for statehood from distant possessions, Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico.

727. After 1880, the "New South" began to reap its share of industrial growth. First it seized upon its long-neglected advantages for cotton manufacture. Northern capital built mills along the "Fall Line" (§ 180), and cheap labor was found by inducing the "Poor Whites" of the neighboring mountain-folk to gather in factory villages, where the indolent

parents might live on the earnings of little children. The awakened South began also to make use of its mines and forests, especially of the rich coal and iron region stretching from West Virginia through Tennessee into Northern Alabama. By 1880, Alabama was sending pig iron to Northern mills, and soon she became herself a great center of steel manufacturing. Thus the old agricultural South was transformed into a new South of varied industries. And even its agriculture has

§ 729]

CONSOLIDATION OF LINES

607

been transformed. Just after the war, attempts were made to cultivate huge plantations of the old type with gangs of hired Negroes. This proved a losing venture; and soon the great plantations began to break up into smaller holdings, rented on shares to Negroes or to Poor Whites. These renters have been growing rapidly into owners. The Negro's wholesome ambition to own a farm promises to be a chief source of industrial and social salvation to his race and to the whole South.

728. Railway extension (§§ 562, 703) had been checked during the four years of war, but the last five years of the sixties almost doubled the mileage of the country. The new lines were located mainly in the Northwestern States and Territories; and they were busied at first only in carrying settlers to the moving frontier, and then soon in bringing back farm produce. From 1873 to 1878, construction was checked again by one of the periodic business panics. Then by 1880, another almost fabulous burst raised the mileage to 92,000, and the next ten years nearly doubled this, - to 164,000 miles. Since 1890, expansion has been less rapid; but the next twenty years (to 1910) raised the total to 237,000 miles. Since 1880, America has had a larger ratio of railway mileage to population than any other country. Railroads represent one seventh the total wealth of the Nation, and employ more than a million men.

The eighties witnessed also a transformation in the old railroads. Heavier steel rails, thanks to the Bessemer invention,1 replaced iron. This made possible the use of heavier locomotives and of steel cars of greater size; and these called in turn for straightening curves, cutting down grades, and bettering roadbeds. Such changes "fixed" a large amount of capital, but they greatly reduced the cost of transportation.

729. More significant than these physical changes was the consolidation of railway management and ownership. In 1860 no one

1 It was this same invention that made possible also a transformation of cities in exterior, and in character of life, -a change symbolized by the replacement of the old four or five-storied buildings by the new steel ten-to-thirtystoried structures.

company reached from the Atlantic to Chicago: indeed, no com. pany controlled five hundred miles of road. One short line led to another, and so to another, perhaps with awkward gaps, and certainly with annoying and costly transfers, and with confus ing changes in rates and in schedules and sometimes in width of track. By 1880, the gaps had been filled, gauges unified, and small lines grouped into larger systems- still counting, however, some 1500. By 1895, this number had been cut in half by further consolidation, and forty leading lines controlled half the mileage of the whole country. Since 1905, all important lines have been controlled by seven or eight groups of capitalists.

730. A like consolidation of capital and management has been marked in nearly every sort of industry and commerce.1 The age of small individual enterprise has given way to an age of large combinations. Small stores merged into department stores; small firms into larger corporations; large corporations into still larger "trusts." In the East, the making of " ready-made" clothing became a mighty factory industry, and new leather sewing machinery built up huge shoe-factories. In the West, the farmer's grain was no longer ground in a neighboring mill on some small stream, but in great flour centers like Minneapolis; and his beeves and hogs went, not to a village slaughter-house, but to the vast meat-packing industries of Chicago. Even in agriculture this era of combination saw a new type of "bonanza farmers,” each owning his thousands of rich acres in the Dakotas; and "cattle kings" seized on the immense feeding ranges of the Southwest.

In connection with new scientific knowledge, this combination brought vast saving of wealth. The old village slaughter house threw away horns and hoofs and hair and intestines: the great packing-house works up all these "everything except the squeal" into articles of use. Pine stumps were found valuable for turpentine, and the Southern cottonseed, formerly consigned to troublesome refuse heaps, was found highly

1 Between 1880 and 1890 the number of woolen mills decreased from 1990 to 1311, and the manufactories of farm implements from 1943 to 910; but in each line the output was more than doubled. So, too, of iron and steel mills.