§ 434] ROADS AND TRAVEL 359 433. The westward march of our population had barely begun. In 1800 the "center of population" was eighteen miles west of Baltimore. Ten years before, it had been forty-one miles farther east. The half million people west of the mountains dwelt still in four or five isolated groups, all included in a broad, irregular wedge of territory with its apex reaching not quite to the Mississippi (map, facing p. 269). The greater part of our own half of the great valley was yet unknown even to the frontiersman. In his inaugural, Jefferson, enthusiast that he was regarding his country's future, asserted that we then had 66 room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and even thousandth generation." Before his next inaugural, he was to double that territory. 1 434. Communication remained much as before the Revolution. The States had little more intercourse with one another, as yet, than the colonies had enjoyed. The lowest letter postage was eight cents from New York to Boston it was twenty cents. In 1790 there were only 75 post offices in the country - for a territory and population which under modern conditions would have some 6000. A traveler could jolt by clumsy and cramped stagecoach, at four miles an hour, from Boston to New York in three days, and on to Philadelphia in two days more - longer than it now takes to go from Boston to San Francisco. Such travel, too, cost from three to four times as much as modern travel by rail. South of the Potomac, traveling was possible only on horseback with frequent embarrassments from absence of bridges or ferries. Between 1790 and 1800, a few canals were constructed, and attention was turning to the possibilities in that means of communication. Freights by land averaged, it is computed, ten cents a mile per ton, even in the settled areas, or ten times the rates our railroads charge. Merely to move sugar from the coast to any point 300 miles inland cost more than sugar sells for to-day anywhere in the country. 1 This was three times the number at the opening of the Revolution. England had introduced a postal system into the colonies, but it was very crude. 435. Occupations had changed little since 1775 (§§ 203 ff.). The year after the peace with England saw the first American voyage to China; and shipmasters began at once to reach out for the attractive profits of that Oriental trade. The European wars were favoring our carrying trade with the Old World. John Jacob Astor was organizing the great American Fur Company, to follow the furs into the far Northwest. Manufactures were making a little progress. A few iron mills were at work; and, between 1790 and 1812, some of the machinery recently invented in England for spinning and weaving cotton was introduced. In England, by 1800, such machinery had worked an AN EARLY COTTON GIN. By the courtesy of the Library of Congress. 1 "Industrial Revolution "; but it did not come into use extensively here until nearly 1830 (528 ff.). 436. For America the chief result of the Industrial Revolution at this time was England's increased demand for raw cotton for her new factories. Cotton had been costly because the seed had always had to be separated from the fiber by hand. But 1 Modern Progress, chs. xxiii-xxv, or Modern World, chs. xlii-xliv. § 437] WAGES AND FRUGALITY 361 in 1793 Eli Whitney, a Connecticut schoolmaster in Georgia, invented an "engine" for this work. This cotton gin was simple enough to be run by a slave; and with it one man could "clean" as much cotton as 300 men could by hand. Southern planters at once gave their attention to meeting the new English demand. In 1791 we exported only 200,000 pounds: in 1800 the amount was 100 times that; and this was doubled the third year after. Soon the South could boast, "Cotton is King." 437. Farming tools and methods had improved little in four thousand years. The American farmer with strenuous toil FARM TOOLS. The wagon is the only machinery not here included. scratched the soil with a clumsy wooden homemade bull plow. He had no other machines for horses to draw, except a rude harrow and a cart. He sowed his grain by hand, cut it with the sickle of primitive times, and thrashed it out on the barn floor with the flail older than history-if he did not tread it out by cattle, as the ancient Egyptians did. The first threshing machine had been invented in 1785, but it had not yet come into use. The cradle-scythe a hand tool, but a vast improvement over the old sickle was patented in 1803. The first improvements on the plow date from experiments on |