A MEASURE OF THE COUNTRY’S GROWTH
FOR America was still only on the threshold of that wonderful development which was to make her in the beginning of the twentieth century one of the half-dozen great Powers of the world; with a homogeneous white population second in numbers only to that of Russia; with accumulated wealth exceeding in per capita average that of any other country except perhaps England; and with imperial interests in Cuba, Porto Rico, Central America, Samoa, the Philippine Islands, and China.
The population of the United States in 1860 was only 31,443,000, or less than one third what it was in 1912; and the estimated total wealth was $16,159,616,000, or about one seventh of the great accumulations of to-day. Of these amounts, moreover, the South had taken out of the Union a proportion which may be estimated roughly at two fifths. Railway mileage, which was 30,626 for the whole Union in 1860, had increased only to 35,085 in 1865, or less than one seventh the mileage of to-day. Much of the country west of the Mississippi was still an untracked wilderness. Senator John Sherman, after the adjournment of Congress in 1866, made a vacation trip with his brother, General William T. Sherman, in the general’s official inspection of army posts. The Central Pacific Railroad ended at Fort Kearney, and thence the party traveled in light army-wagons drawn by mules, camping at night, sleeping in the wagons, the horses parked near by, guarded by sentinels, and with the frequent menace of Indian attack.
Skilful as was the financial leadership required to reduce expenditures, reform taxation, and refund the debt, these were the least difficult in a sense of the economic problems of the war, because they were chiefly problems of legislation. Much more serious were the questions of escape from the hectic influences of war prices and conditions and of inflated government-paper issues; and these were to give their color to the industrial and financial history of the country for a generation. Dreams of untold fortunes derived from speculation in the securities of new railways were rendered peculiarly vivid by the disorganized state of the currency and the fluctuations in its gold value, stimulated by manipulation in the gold-room of the New York Stock Exchange, but due fundamentally to uncertainty as to the quantity of currency in circulation and as to when it would be made redeemable. Thaddeus Stevens went to the extreme of declaring that one of the measures proposed, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, would put under the absolute and uncontrolled discretion of that official more than sixteen hundred million dollars’ worth of paper money, and would confer upon him more power “than was ever before conferred upon any one man in a government claiming to have a constitution.” It is small wonder that amid such possibilities speculation became a rankly luxuriant growth of the financial markets.