impossible to execute. Under such circumstances, Nature was much bigger and stronger than man.

Struggle

She would

suffer no sudden highways to be thrown across with Nature. her spaces; she abated not an inch of her mountains, compromised not a foot of her forests. Still, she did not daunt the designs of the new nation born on the sea-edge of her wilds. Here is the secret, a secret so open, it would seem, as to baffle the penetration of none, which many witnesses of the material growth and territorial expansion of the United States have strangely failed to divine. The history of the country and the ambitions of its people have been deemed both sordid Inspiration and mean, inspired by nothing better than a of the task. desire for the gross comforts of material abundance; and it has been pronounced grotesque that mere bigness and wealth should be put forward as the most prominent grounds for the boast of greatness. The obvious fact is that for the creation of the nation the conquest of her proper territory from Nature was first necessary; and this task, which is hardly yet completed, has been idealized in the popular mind. A bold race has derived inspiration from the size, the difficulty, the danger of the task.

Expansion has meant nationalization; nationalization has meant strength and elevation of view.

"Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines; By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,"

is the spirited command of enthusiasm for the great physical undertaking upon which political success was conditioned.

4. Speed and Character of Growth.

Whatever fortune might have attended that undertaking by other instrumentalities, it is very clear that it was

steam, and steam alone, that gave it speed and full assurance of ultimate success. Fulton had successfully applied Steam steam to navigation in 1807, and immediately navigation. the immense practical value of his invention in the building up of a nation became evident. By 1811 steamboats had appeared in considerable numbers on the great river highways of the West; and with their assistance the river valleys began rapidly to fill up with settlers. Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, indeed, the first fruits of western settlement, had been created without the aid of steam, and were an earnest of what the nation had meant to accomplish, whether Nature were compliant or not. But it was not until 1810 that States began rapidly to spring up. Within the period of little more than nine years, from April, 1812, to August, 1821, seven States were admitted to the Union; and by the latter date there were already eleven new States associated with the original thirteen in the conduct of the federal government.

New States.

For fifteen years after the admission of Missouri no other State was created. During those years the populaDistribution tion was being compacted rather than extended. of the people. Not only were those districts entered and filled which settlement had hitherto left untouched in its hasty progress, but the density of population within the regions already occupied showed a marked rate of increase. The aggregate population of the nine States which had been created toward the west was already almost half as great as the aggregate population of the States which had formed the Union in 1789.

5. A Rural Nation.

• This growth of population, it is important to note, had not been creative of cities so much as of simple and for the most part sparsely settled agricultural communities,

Rural communities.

Manufac

tures and

living each its own arduous, narrow life in comparative isolation. Railways were just beginning to be built in 1830travellers moved slowly and with difficulty from place to place; news was sluggish, extended communication almost impossible. It was a time when local prejudices could be nursed in security; when old opinion was safe against disturbance; when discussion must be ill informed and dogmatic. The whole people, moreover, were self-absorbed, their entire energies consumed in the dull, prosaic tasks imposed upon them by their incomplete civilization. Everything was both doing and to be done. There was no store of things accomplished, and there must needs be haste in progress. Not many manufactures had been developed; comparatively little agricultural produce was sent abroad. Exports there were, indeed, but more imports. commerce. Neither of these, moreover, bore any direct proportion to the increase of population.. When foreign wars or the failure of crops in Europe created prices in transatlantic markets which greatly tempted to exportation, exportation of course took place, was even for a year or two greatly stimulated, as, for example, in 1807. But presently it would fall to its old level again. The total value of the exports of 1829 was no greater than the total value of those of 1798. Manufactures, too, had been developed only upon a small scale by the War of 1812 and the restrictive commercial policy which had attended and followed it. Jackson came to the presidency at the beginning of a new industrial era, when railways were about to quicken every movement of commercial enterprise and political intercourse, and when manufactures were about to be developed on the great scale, but before these changes had been accomplished or generally foreseen. Hitherto the country had dreamed little of the economic and social revolution that was to

come. It was full of strength, but it was not various in its equipment. It was a big, ungainly, rural nation; alert but uncultured; honest and manly, but a bit vulgar and quite without poise; self-conscious, but not self-contained, a race of homespun provincials.

Education.

6. Limitations upon Culture.

There was, of course, not a little culture and refinement in some parts of the country. Among the wealthy planters of the South there was to be seen, along with simple modes of rural life, a courtliness of bearing, a knowledge of the world and of books, and an easy adaptability to different kinds of society which exhibited only enough of the provincial to give them freshness and piquancy. New Englanders of all sorts and conditions had been affected by a system of popular education, although they had by no means all partaken of it; and those of the better sort had received a college training that had put them in the way of the higher means of culture. Books as well as life, old knowledge as well as new experience, schools as well as struggles with Nature, had gone to make up the American of the time. There were cultured families everywhere, and in some communities even a cultivated class.. But everything was condi

American society. by the standards of the older society of Europe, the life of Americans in their homes, and their behavior in public, seemed primitive and rude. Their manners were too free and noisy, their information touching things that did not immediately concern themselves too limited, their inquisitiveness too little guarded by delicacy, their etiquette too accidental. Their whole life, though interesting by reason of its ceaseless activity and movement, and inspiriting by reason of its personal courage and initiative, was ungainly, unsuited to the drawing-room. There

tioned by the newness of the country.. Judged

was too much strain, and too little grace.

Men took their

work too seriously, and did not take social amenities seriously enough. Their energy was fine, but had too little dignity and repose.

Literature.

In the literature of culture and imagination, Americans had as yet done almost nothing. Their literary work, like their work of settlement and institutional development, had hitherto been subject to the stress of theology and politics. Their best minds had bent themselves to the thoughts that might make for progress, to the task of constructing systems of conduct and devising safe plans of reform. A literature of wisdom had grown up; but there had been no burst of song, no ardor of creative imagination. Oratory, deserving to rank with that already classical, flourished as almost the only form of imaginative art.

conditions.

In brief, the nation had not yet come into possession either of leisure or of refinement. Its strength was rough and ready; its thought chastened only in those spheres Intellectual in which it had had experience. It had been making history and constructing systems of politics, and in such fields its thinking was informed and practised. But there was too much haste and noise for the more delicate faculties of the mind; men could not pause long enough for profound contemplation; and there was very little in the strenuous life about them to quicken the quieter and more subtle powers of poetic interpretation. The country was as yet, moreover, neither homogeneous nor united. Its elements were being stirred hotly together. A keen and perilous ferment was necessary ere the pure, fine wine of ultimate national principle should be produced. With full, complex, pulsing life, penetrated by the sharp and intricate interplay of various forces, and yet consciously single and organic, was to come also the literature of insight and creation.