carried sugar, molasses, and fruits from Hawaii to the Oregon port of Astoria.  The next year a vessel from Hongkong brought rice, mats, and tea from China.  An era of lucrative trade was opened.  The annexation of Hawaii in 1898, the addition of the Philippines at the same time, and the participation of American troops in the suppression of the Boxer rebellion in Peking in 1900, were but signs and symbols of American power on the Pacific.

[Illustration:  From an old print

COMMODORE PERRY’S MEN MAKING PRESENTS TO THE JAPANESE]

=Conservation and the Land Problem.=—­The disappearance of the frontier also brought new and serious problems to the governments of the states and the nation.  The people of the whole United States suddenly were forced to realize that there was a limit to the rich, new land to exploit and to the forests and minerals awaiting the ax and the pick.  Then arose in America the questions which had long perplexed the countries of the Old World—­the scientific use of the soils and conservation of natural resources.  Hitherto the government had followed the easy path of giving away arable land and selling forest and mineral lands at low prices.  Now it had to face far more difficult and complex problems.  It also had to consider questions of land tenure again, especially if the ideal of a nation of home-owning farmers was to be maintained.  While there was plenty of land for every man or woman who wanted a home on the soil, it made little difference if single landlords or companies got possession of millions of acres, if a hundred men in one western river valley owned 17,000,000 acres; but when the good land for small homesteads was all gone, then was raised the real issue.  At the opening of the twentieth century the nation, which a hundred years before had land and natural resources apparently without limit, was compelled to enact law after law conserving its forests and minerals.  Then it was that the great state of California, on the very border of the continent, felt constrained to enact a land settlement measure providing government assistance in an effort to break up large holdings into small lots and to make it easy for actual settlers to acquire small farms.  America was passing into a new epoch.

=References=

Henry Inman, The Old Santa Fe Trail.

R.I.  Dodge, The Plains of the Great West (1877).

C.H.  Shinn, The Story of the Mine.

Cy Warman, The Story of the Railroad.

Emerson Hough, The Story of the Cowboy.

H.H.  Bancroft is the author of many works on the West but his writings will be found only in the larger libraries.

Joseph Schafer, History of the Pacific Northwest (ed. 1918).

T.H.  Hittel, History of California (4 vols.).

W.H.  Olin, American Irrigation Farming.

W.E.  Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America.