=The Expansion of the American Market.=—­Upon industry as well as agriculture, the opening of vast food-producing regions told in a thousand ways.  The demand for farm machinery, clothing, boots, shoes, and other manufactures gave to American industries such a market as even Hamilton had never foreseen.  Moreover it helped to expand far into the Mississippi Valley the industrial area once confined to the Northern seaboard states and to transform the region of the Great Lakes into an industrial empire.  Herein lies the explanation of the growth of mid-western cities after 1865.  Chicago, with its thirty-five railways, tapped every locality of the West and South.  To the railways were added the water routes of the Lakes, thus creating a strategic center for industries.  Long foresight carried the McCormick reaper works to Chicago before 1860.  From Troy, New York, went a large stove plant.  That was followed by a shoe factory from Massachusetts.  The packing industry rose as a matter of course at a point so advantageous for cattle raisers and shippers and so well connected with Eastern markets.

To the opening of the Far West also the Lake region was indebted for a large part of that water-borne traffic which made it “the Mediterranean basin of North America.”  The produce of the West and the manufactures of the East poured through it in an endless stream.  The swift growth of shipbuilding on the Great Lakes helped to compensate for the decline of the American marine on the high seas.  In response to this stimulus Detroit could boast that her shipwrights were able to turn out a ten thousand ton Leviathan for ore or grain about “as quickly as carpenters could put up an eight-room house.”  Thus in relation to the Far West the old Northwest territory—­the wilderness of Jefferson’s time—­had taken the position formerly occupied by New England alone.  It was supplying capital and manufactures for a vast agricultural empire West and South.

=America on the Pacific.=—­It has been said that the Mediterranean Sea was the center of ancient civilization; that modern civilization has developed on the shores of the Atlantic; and that the future belongs to the Pacific.  At any rate, the sweep of the United States to the shores of the Pacific quickly exercised a powerful influence on world affairs and it undoubtedly has a still greater significance for the future.

Very early regular traffic sprang up between the Pacific ports and the Hawaiian Islands, China, and Japan.  Two years before the adjustment of the Oregon controversy with England, namely in 1844, the United States had established official and trading relations with China.  Ten years later, four years after the admission of California to the union, the barred door of Japan was forced open by Commodore Perry.  The commerce which had long before developed between the Pacific ports and Hawaii, China, and Japan now flourished under official care.  In 1865 a ship from Honolulu