two Republicans from the Supreme Court, with a fifth justice of the Court to be chosen by his four colleagues on the Commission. It was expected that Judge David Davis of Illinois, an Independent, would be chosen as the fifth member from the Supreme Court. But just at the time of the selection of the tribunal Davis was elected to the United States Senate by a fusion of Democratic and Independent votes in the legislature of Illinois. As there remained only Republicans on the Supreme Bench, the Commission was perforce made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. When the sets of returns were brought before the Commission during the month of February, the decision in each case, by a vote of eight to seven, was in favor of receiving the votes regularly attested by the Republican canvassing board of the states. In other words, the Commission refused to "go behind the returns" and investigate the justice or injustice of the count in the states.' The disputed votes, therefore, were all counted for Hayes, who was declared elected on March 2, 1877, by a vote of 185 to 184. Three days later he was peacefully inaugurated, and the country breathed a sigh of relief. Thousands of pages have been written on the disputed election of 1876, and high authorities continue to differ on the justice of the decision. Professor Burgess, for example, in his "Reconstruction and the Constitution" (p. 295), defends Hayes's title to the presidency as unimpeachable in law and equity: "A perfectly fair election in the 'states' of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, with the law of suffrage then obtaining, would probably have resulted in a popular majority for the Republican candidates for electors. Accepting the law of suffrage as then existing for the basis of our reasoning, it will have to be conceded that the Republicans were in the right both morally and legally, and that the title of Hayes and Wheeler . . . was entirely sound and unimpeachable." On the other hand, 1 It is interesting to note here that the two parties changed sides on the issue of states' rights, the Republicans insisting on respecting the decision of the state boards, and the Democrats wishing Congress to override the certified returns from the states. Mr. Rhodes believes that Democratic electors were chosen in Florida and Louisiana. "As a matter of fact," he writes (Vol. VII, p. 233), "Wells1 and his satellites (the returning board) in secret conclave determined the presidency of the United States"; and adds, "If Hayes had envisaged the facts as I do now, he would have refused to accept the presidency from the Louisiana returning board." It is difficult to see how Hayes could have refused to accept the presidency, however, when the votes were adjudged to him by a legal commission created by Congress and approved by a Democratic vote.' Hayes believed that a fair election in the South would have resulted in a Republican victory, and was undoubtedly sincere in his declaration that he would not take the office unless it came to him by methods that would stand "the severest scrutiny." His conduct, like that of Tilden, was above reproach during the trying. winter of suspense. Both men effaced themselves. Neither would give the slightest encouragement to suggestions of violence, intimidation, venality, or chicane. Historians will probably never reach a consensus on the question of which man was really elected, because their judgment in the case depends on the balancing of one set of frauds against another. Large committees were sent by both parties to witness the counting of the ballots at New Orleans, Columbia, and Tallahassee. These "visiting statesmen" presented voluminous reports, which serve rather to confuse than to clarify the situation. In Louisiana, for example, a fair count of the ballots actually cast would have probably given the state to Tilden; but it is equally clear that a free election would have 1J. M. Wells, the Republican ex-governor of Louisiana, was chairman of the returning board of the state. He was surveyor of the port of New Orleans in 1876, and had a reputation for rascality. He is said to have offered to sell the electoral vote of Louisiana to Tilden for $200,000. 2 The Electoral Commission Act was passed by a vote of 47 to 17 in the Senate and 191 to 86 in the House. Only 19 of the total 103 votes against the bill were cast by Democrats; only 53 of the 238 for it were cast by Republicans. It was therefore a Democratic measure. The Republicans opposed the commission because they believed that Ferry would count the Hayes returns and that President Grant would use the army, if necessary, to enforce the decision. given the state to Hayes. That many Democratic votes were thrown out by the returning board is certain; whether more or fewer than the illegal registrations is uncertain. Whatever we may think of the expediency of the Fifteenth Amendment, the negroes had the legal right to vote. But in one of the "bulldozed parishes" (counties) of Louisiana in which more than 2000 negroes were registered not a single vote was cast for the Republican electors. Five parishes, with 13,244 colored and 5134 white voters, returned a Democratic majority of 4495. To these statistics, furnished by the Republican visiting statesmen, the Democrats replied that the Republicans of Louisiana had either purposely refrained from voting so that they could get the returns thrown out on the charge of intimidation, or that "a large number of colored men who had heretofore voted with the Republican party voted with the Democrats at this election." The student wanders in a maze of charges and countercharges, incriminations, recriminations, and contradictions. Viewed through the perspective of half a century, this unique electoral crisis in our history has quite a different aspect from what it had for the men of that day. The apprehensions that the seating of Tilden would mean the undoing of the results of the war, the reënslavement of the negro, the assumption of the Confederate debt, and the surrender of the government into the hands of unreconciled "rebels," seem to us now rather foolish; and the events soon proved that the seating of Hayes neither provoked an outraged majority of the voters to rise in arms to vindicate their thwarted will nor destroyed the confidence of the people in the continued workings of our democracy. Whether Hayes or Tilden took the oath of office in 1877 was of comparatively slight importance. What was of great importance, however, was the fact that the year which opened the second century of American independence found a nation of 45,000,000 so firmly rooted in the principles of democracy and so securely established in the habit of orderly self-government that a crisis which in many countries would have precipitated an armed conflict of factions was quietly passed without a gesture of revolution or the shedding of a drop of blood. CHAPTER II THE BASES OF A NEW NATIONALISM And what if trade sow cities like shells along the shore, THE FARMER AND THE LABORER Absorbed first in the relentless task of winning the war, then in the adjustment of political, fiscal, and diplomatic questions which were chiefly raised by the war, the government at Washington paid little or no attention during the period from Lincoln to Hayes to certain economic and social stirrings which we, from the standpoint of a juster perspective, realize were of the utmost importance in our national development. Governments are naturally conservative. Long-established habits of administrative routine, a vast amount of unfinished business, apprehension of the dangerous lengths to which innovation may go, and the political necessity for keeping party solidarity intact, all act as deterrents to new departures in legislation and administration. The discontent with things as they are, which from time to time gathers in reform movements, seldom starts in the field of politics. It is a social protest, the expression of a grievance of a group or class of people who feel that they are the victims of neglect, discrimination, or oppression, by the powers in control of the government. No age, of course,-not even the most golden age of concord,-is entirely free from such protest, because a perfectly equitable government is a utopian dream. But there are periods in which conditions are peculiarly susceptible to the workings of the ferment of social and economic discontent. Such a period followed our Civil War. Under the stimulus of unprecedented demands and unusual encouragements, agri cultural and manufacturing industries advanced at a rapid rate in the sixties. The frontier moved steadily westward as the demobilized soldiers and new hordes of immigrants joined the rush to take up the homesteads offered by the government. The clatter of the reaper and the rumble of the locomotive were heard farther and farther out on the treeless plains that had stretched silent toward the setting sun. The products of our mills and factories, protected against European competition by the high war tariffs, outran local demands and sought wider markets across the seas. In the ten years following the war our production of pig iron doubled, our output of coal was multiplied fivefold, and our output of steel one hundred fold. While our population grew from 31,443,321 in 1860 to 38,558,371 in 1870, a gain of 22.6 per cent,-our railroad mileage increased 43.6 per cent, and our manufacturing establishments 79 per cent. Improved machinery, better business organization, enlarged transportation facilities, and the confident spirit of American enterprise all encouraged production on a greater scale. Unprecedented fortunes began to gather in the hands of successful men, providing large amounts of fluid capital for reinvestment or for ostentatious expenditure. It was the beginning of an era of the most astounding economic transformation that the world has ever seen in a single generation-the transformation of an America of pioneer farmers, independent manufacturers, staid business partnerships, and production measured to local needs into a vast complex structure of "big business," with capital issues based on anticipated profits rather than on actual assets; with speculative production for as yet uncreated markets; with overbold extension of railway mileage; with cutthroat competition in rates and prices, preparing the way for huge combinations of capital in oil, steel, textiles, food products, transportation, and banking. There had been a few rich men before the war: owners of rapidly appreciating real estate, like the Astors, the Goelets, and the Lenoxes; manufacturers, like the Spragues of Rhode Island or Peter Cooper of New York; "merchant princes," like A. T. Stewart, Moses Taylor, William Aspinwall, and "Commo |