immigrants as cared to till the soil.  Every new pair of strong arms meant more farms and more wealth.  Workmen in Eastern factories, mines, or mills who did not like their hours, wages, or conditions of labor, could readily find an outlet to the land.  Now all that was over.  By about 1890 most of the desirable land available under the Homestead act had disappeared.  American industrial workers confronted a new situation.

=Grain Supplants King Cotton.=—­In the meantime a revolution was taking place in agriculture.  Until 1860 the chief staples sold by America were cotton and tobacco.  With the advance of the frontier, corn and wheat supplanted them both in agrarian economy.  The West became the granary of the East and of Western Europe.  The scoop shovel once used to handle grain was superseded by the towering elevator, loading and unloading thousands of bushels every hour.  The refrigerator car and ship made the packing industry as stable as the production of cotton or corn, and gave an immense impetus to cattle raising and sheep farming.  So the meat of the West took its place on the English dinner table by the side of bread baked from Dakotan wheat.

=Aid in American Economic Independence.=—­The effects of this economic movement were manifold and striking.  Billions of dollars’ worth of American grain, dairy produce, and meat were poured into European markets where they paid off debts due money lenders and acquired capital to develop American resources.  Thus they accelerated the progress of American financiers toward national independence.  The country, which had timidly turned to the Old World for capital in Hamilton’s day and had borrowed at high rates of interest in London in Lincoln’s day, moved swiftly toward the time when it would be among the world’s first bankers and money lenders itself.  Every grain of wheat and corn pulled the balance down on the American side of the scale.

=Eastern Agriculture Affected.=—­In the East as well as abroad the opening of the western granary produced momentous results.  The agricultural economy of that part of the country was changed in many respects.  Whole sections of the poorest land went almost out of cultivation, the abandoned farms of the New England hills bearing solemn witness to the competing power of western wheat fields.  Sheep and cattle raising, as well as wheat and corn production, suffered at least a relative decline.  Thousands of farmers cultivating land of the lower grade were forced to go West or were driven to the margin of subsistence.  Even the herds that supplied Eastern cities with milk were fed upon grain brought halfway across the continent.