nations. The Germanic races will take the lead of the world for centuries, if not forever, and the practical sense of the Anglo-Saxon seems to assure to them always the front of this vanguard of progress and power.

It can not be foreseen that England will ever experience the fate of Assyria, Chaldea, Greece, Carthage, or Rome. Macauley's New Zealander is an impossibility. They all rested on superficial and temporary features of national character and on their relative situation. The prosperity of England rests on the inherent character and mental resources of her inhabitants and on a superior situation. This character and accompanying advantages are developed and strengthened, not worn and wasted, by her advance. When one resource of material power fails another will be easily found. Physical resources and particular advantages may be exhausted and changed; mental power is nourished by action. It does not seem that this vigorous intelligence can ever fail; that it can become the sport of circumstances or the victim of false systems. It is so strongly progressive and so wisely conservative as to become more and more the master of all situations, and no exhaustion of present resources can fail to be replaced by some other and greater. England, apparently, must always advance in greatness.

Yet, her own children, endowed with the leading features of her genius, found a better base for development, and, comparatively unfettered by the past, they had the same high instinct of prudence which has made her great. It led them to loosen the bonds that interfered with free action. The AngloAmerican in the Valley has found a situation and outward resources which he is in the way of improving to the utmost, and which, in less than two centuries of independent life, will give him a decided and permanent advantage over his European relative. America has looser institutions, but the love of order and regard for law; a quick and intelligent perception of interest finds fewer obstacles than in the mother

FUTURE CONCENTRATION OF POWER IN THE VALLEY. 493

country; and her people have commenced a course of successful rivalry that will place the old country in the second rank at no distant day. Great as may be the progress of Old England, the New England, with its wonderful Valley, will outstrip her.

Capital tends toward it—not only because it can gather the largest rewards in the development of the superior mass and quality of resources, and of the greater ease and less expense. of obtaining the raw material for its industries-but also because, from its central situation, it can more readily survey and reach with its products all the various markets for which they are destined. Capital will often cross the mountains and locate at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago or St. Louis, according to the convenience and cheapness of material, if it seeks a market in every region of the country. Circumstances, indeed, modify that movement for the present; facilities are not equally developed in many of the newer sections, markets have not opened everywhere as they will in the course of years. When population has flowed everywhere and produced a demand for manufactures at every point, when competition is so close that small differences in cost of material and transportation, or presence in the general center of the country, secures larger sales at less cost, then what are trifles now will form the real margin of profit, and capital will prefer the Valley to the extreme East or West. This period will come in one, two, or a few, generations.

Business is generalized more readily when it is conducted from the center, unless local circumstances are so favorable as to over-balance that advantage. In a country of spaces so large and sources of prosperity so many and so great, the internal commerce will always remain vastly superior to the foreign, and a large part of it will start from central points. The middle regions of the Valley, therefore, will attract activity and, in the long run, will gather the greatest accumulations of industry and wealth. The business of the whole

country will radiate from it and the tendency to outgrow and to control other sections must constantly increase.

What the country has become in a hundred years is very little to what it will become in another century. Its politics, its industries, its agents of activity, are developed to a stable point-are so unified that the pulsations of its thought and energy meet comparatively trifling obstacles and are felt from ocean to ocean and from Montana to Florida. With this free field activity will organize—that is to say, will regulate and harmonize its various branches so as to lose as little power in conflict as possible; which implies a center and a circumference, a head and extremities, a wise control and subordination. As the body of the people, the bulk of the natural wealth of the country, and conveniences for combining, assimilating and distributing the products of labor are found in the Valley it follows that other sections are united in it and controlled through it.

A large proportion of the commerce, the manufactures and the mining of the other sections are guided by the needs of the center and most important region of the nation. The country finds its unity and completeness in it.

It is no longer possible for one section of the United States to mistreat another. Interests are too closely interlaced, the importance of the welfare of one section to the others would consolidate the majority in all against any scheme of injustice. Although sectional misunderstandings and antagonisms produced a long strife ending in a fearful war, with its heated passions and bitterness, its reaction of demoralization, imperiousness and hatred, yet the contest did not have its root in the hearts, in the character of the people. It was precipitated by temporary and surface obstacles to an understanding which, during its course, were put in the way of extinction.

The passions it called out, the evils it produced, had not force of permanent antagonism to sustain them. The interests, the clear common sense, the natural unity of race, of

THE VALLEY PROMOTES HARMONY.

495

principle and of country, forbade them a long existence. The sympathies of the inhabitants of the northern Valley flow out to the dweller in the Southern States as naturally and irresistibly as do the waters of the Great River. A sense of justice, the impossibility of long withholding natural rights from others, is absolute in the mind of the Anglo-American. Freer and more cosmopolitan in the Valley than elsewhere, the American citizen there banishes the prejudice or partial views that may offend other sections. He is deeply interested in unity of territory, of business and of feeling.

So the country is united in the Valley by all the cords of character, of sympathy, of policy, and of interest which bind a community into what we call a nation. With the close of the war, time only was wanted to produce the strongest national sentiment known to history. The free operation of the laws of association disposed of every evil existing before," or cultivated by, the war, and the powerful influences that brought the great work of reconciliation near to a conclusion in twelve years after its close with a celerity and irresistibie force known only to American annals, were, in largest part, those springing from the Valley.

It has nearly eliminated the Southern question, the negro question, the States rights question, from politics. The Valley requires national union, a harmonious but a decentralized government-an indissoluble union, but one which cares for all interests, cultivates earnest common sympathies, and ieaves each locality to attend solely to local affairs.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE NEW UNITY OF THE VALLEY.

The development of commerce on the Lakes and its move. ment through the Erie canal eastward emphasized the growing tendency of the country to divide on "Masons and Dixon's Line" into North and South. Industries, commerce and politics, social, civil and financial differences, tended to override and disregard some of the natural unities founded on geological and geographical bas his tendency was resisted by the river system until the railroad system was developed, when the loosening of the bonds between the upper and lower basins of the Valley became the ruling feature. They were separated by temporary interests even more effectually than by political contests. The course of trade united all the free States and secured their success in the civil war It was a fortunate coincidence for the permanence of the Union.

With the close of the war all natural unities began to reassert themselves. The upper and lower parts of the Valley were sufficiently various in productions to prevent their being rivals in the markets of the East and of the world; they had mutual interests of exchange and of commerce that must grow larger with every year; they could assist each other's development effectually in many ways, and their greatest future welfare required that they should be as closely united by social, political and business ties as they were by unbroken slopes and levels, and by waterways.

The lake system and relations with the manufactures and commerce of the Northern Atlantic States were only two among the numerous connections of the great Valley. It was a question if the relations instituted by the Mexican Gulf