had to solve for themselves. As population grew, state governments had more business, more calls for taxes, more need for passing laws that would relieve the poor and help to build up the community.

Another kind of government also grew very rapidly, and that was the cities. In 1830 there was only one city with a population over 100,000; in 1860 there were nine. In 1830 only one-fifteenth of the population lived in towns and cities, in 1860 the "urban" population had grown to one-sixth. For such large places the old-fashioned methods of life were not enough.

Instead of dirt roads there must be stone pavements; instead of the town pumps, water systems were put in with costly reservoirs and pipes. Philadelphia and New York built very elaborate waterworks, parts of which are still in service. New schoolhouses, city halls, public markets and jails were built. Gas was introduced for lighting streets and houses. Instead of the old and feeble watchmen came uniformed police forces. In some of the states the city governments raised and spent more money than the state governments, and to be mayor of New York or Boston or Baltimore, was as important as to be governor of the state.

Railroads

To send out a population to the Northwest and Southwest and build up new communities beyond the Mississippi, would hardly have been possible except for the invention of a new method of transit, the railroad.

The first such railroad in America was the Baltimore and Ohio, opened in 1830 for cars drawn by horses. The same year a steam locomotive was built by Peter Cooper and was set to work on the Baltimore and Ohio. Its success caused rail lines to be started out of most of the large Eastern cities.

At first the railroads were built mostly in short lengths, on the principle of the stage lines. In a few years the system spread through the Eastern states. The first through line to reach the Great Lakes from the East was the Erie Railroad, completed in 1851; and in 1853 the railroad reached Chicago; and the first continuous road across the mountains was the Baltimore and Ohio, which reached Wheeling in 1853. In 1860 New Orleans was linked up from the eastward.

By 1860 railroads were extending beyond the Mississippi. Farther west were the two great wagon routes known as the Santa Fe Trail, extending southwest from Kansas City, and the Oregon Trail extending west and northwest to the Columbia River.

Railroad Companies Railroads cost a great deal of money. Most of the railroads, were built by private stock companies, with the aid of grants and loans from states, countries and cities. About one-third of all the money that went into railroads during the first forty years came out of state and local governments.

These companies had to get charters from the states, and no charter was good beyond the border of the state that granted it.

During this period, 1829-1861, the movement of the people was ever WESTWARD. This picture of a pioneer train of prairie schooners is printed by courtesy of the Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Hence a road like the New York Central is made up of many links of these original short lines. The railroads quickly took the place of most of the canals because they could give much more rapid transportation, be run both summer and winter, and because a car could be loaded or unloaded on any switch, and transferred from one railroad to another.

The United States shared in canals and roads by land grants to the states which they were allowed to turn over for the construction of the canals. In 1850 the same method was used in the first land grant to a railroad-the Illinois Central. For everybody recognized that cheap transportation reaching reaching through through the whole country, was one of the best means for binding the land together and making a prosperous business community.

Business

The country was beginning to make use of many other callThe ings besides farming. American merchant fleet was large, and the next thirty years was the high tide in the building of the celebrated American clipper ships-the most graceful and the fastest sailing ships that the world ever knew.

Factories of many kinds were built in New England, and the Middle states, especially on the water powers of the rivers, for coal had not yet come into use as a general fuel. Pennsylvania was developing its system of iron furnaces and rolling mills, and began to employ anthracite coal for heating houses and also for smelting iron. Raw bituminous coal was first used in iron furnaces in western Pennsylvania

about 1837. Iron ore and coal mines were opened in many places in the West, and also the lead mines of western Illinois.

Social Classes

All this meant that a new kind of rich man and a new kind of workman were coming to the front. Alongside the landowners and the shipowners now stood thousands of owners of textile mills and mines and sawmills. The two richest men of the time were Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, who was a banker and business man, and John Jacob Astor of New York, who made a fortune out of the fur trade and other lines of busi

ness.

Another social class was the professional men. In the older parts of the country, the ministers and doctors and lawyers had a special education. The building of roads and canals and bridges and factories and the development of cities called for trained engineers. On the frontiers and in the rough and mountain regions, neither preachers, doctors nor lawyers had much education, but they all helped to build up their communities.

The largest social class was that of the farmers, who spent their lives in the narrow circle that could easily be reached from the farm, but many of their sons and daughters were beginning to go to the cities.

It appears that the American people of 1830 were no more one kind of people than they are now. There were rich and poor, employers and laborers, masters and slaves. Yet visitors from other lands, and thoughtful Americans saw that here was

after all one people, with about

the same general ideas about religion and work and play and public service that Americans have today.

Labor

In every part of the Union somebody must break the wild land, cultivate the farms and roads and plantations, build villages, put up the buildings for towns and cities, and keep the mills and mines and. factories and ships going.

There was only a small class of farm hands working for wages, because so much of the work was done by the farmers, and their sons and daughters. The rough work of plantation and city in the South was done by negroes who were mostly slaves.

A new class was that of steamboat men and railroad men, and skilled laborers, who were to be found in the towns and cities, and felt themselves as good as their farmer neighbors.

The class of hired labor was increased by the new factory The hands, men and women. hours were long-sometimes fourteen hours a day-the conditions bad, the wages low. Laborers began to form trade unions. The courts after a long struggle consented that strikes Still the were not unlawful.

unions were weak and child labor was common in the manufacturing regions.

The equal power of the slave states was kept up by the admission of the slave states of Arkansas, 1836 (25th), Florida, 1845 (27th) and Texas, 1845 (28th). These were balanced by Michigan, 1837 (26th), Iowa, 1846 (29th) and Wisconsin, 1848