A New History of the United States / The greater republic, embracing the growth and achievements of our country from the earliest days of discovery and settlement to the present eventful year

by Charles Morris

We have one more war to record, the brief but important struggle of 1898, entered into by the United States under the double impulse of indignation against the barbarous destruction of the Maine and of sympathy for the starving and oppressed people of Cuba. It yielded results undreamed of in its origin. Not only was Cuba wrested from the feeble and inhuman hands of Spain, but new possessions in the oceans of the east and west were added to the United States, and for the first time this country took its predestined place among the nations engaged in shaping the destiny of the world, rose to imperial dignity in the estimation of the rulers of Europe, and fairly won that title of the Greater Republic which this work is written to commemorate.

Such has been the record of this country in war. Its record in peace has been marked by as steady a career of victory, and with results stupendous almost beyond the conception of man, when we consider that the most of them have been achieved within little more than a century. During the colonial period the energies of the American people were confined largely to agriculture, Great Britain sternly prohibiting any progress in manufacture and any important development of commerce. It need hardly be said that the restless and active spirit of the colonists chafed under these restrictions, and that the attempt to clip the expanding wings of the American eagle had as much to do with bringing on the war of the Revolution as had Great Britain's futile efforts at taxation. The genius of a great people cannot thus be cribbed and confined, and American enterprise was bound to find a way or carve itself a way through the barriers raised by British avarice and tyranny.

It was after the Revolution that the progress of this country first fairly began. The fetters which bound its hands thrown off, it entered upon a career of prosperity which broadened with the years, and extended until not only the whole continent but the whole world felt its influence and was embraced by its results. Manufacture, no longer held in check, sprang up and spread with marvelous rapidity. Commerce, now gaining access to all seas and all lands, expanded with equal speed. Enterprise everywhere made itself manifest, and invention began its long and wonderful career.

In fact, freedom was barely won before our inventors were actively at work. Before the Constitution was formed John Fitch was experimenting with his steamboat on the Delaware, and Oliver Evans was seeking to move wagons by steam in the streets of Philadelphia. Not many years elapsed before both were successful, and Eli Whitney with his cotton-gin had set free the leading industry of the South and enabled it to begin that remarkable career which proved so momentous in American history, since to it we owe the Civil War with all its great results.

With the opening of the nineteenth century the development of the industries and of the inventive faculty of the Americans went on with enhanced rapidity. The century was but a few years old when Fulton, with his improved steamboat, solved the question of inland water transportation. By the end of the first quarter of the century this was solved in another way by the completion of the Erie Canal, the longest and hitherto the most valuable of artificial water-ways. The railroad locomotive, though invented in England, was prefigured when Oliver Evans' steam road-wagon ran sturdily through the streets of Philadelphia. To the same inventor we owe another triumph of American genius, the grain elevator, which the development of agriculture has rendered of incomparable value. The railroad, though not native here, has had here its greatest development, and with its more than one hundred and eighty thousand miles of length has no rival in any country upon the earth. To it may be added the Morse system of telegraphy, the telephone and phonograph, the electric light and electric motor, and all that wonderful series of inventions in electrical science which has been due to American genius.

We cannot begin to name the multitude of inventions in the mechanical industries which have raised manufacture from an art to a science and filled the world with the multitude of its products. It will suffice to name among them the steam hammer, the sewing machine, the cylinder printing-press, the type-setting machine, the rubber vulcanizer, and the innumerable improvements in steam engines and labor-saving apparatus of all kinds. These manufacturing expedients have been equaled in number and importance by those applied to agriculture, including machines for plowing, reaping, sowing the seed, threshing the grain, cutting the grass, and a hundred other valuable processes, which have fairly revolutionized the art of tilling the earth, and enabled our farmers to feed not only our own population but to send millions of bushels of grain annually abroad.

In truth, we have entered here upon an interminable field, so full of triumphs of invention and ingenuity, and so stupendous in its results, as to form one of the chief marvels of this wonderful century, and to place our nation, in the field of human industry and mechanical achievement, foremost among the nations of the world. Its triumphs have not been confined to manufacture and agriculture; it has been as active in commerce, and now stands first in the bulk of its exports and imports. In every other direction of industry it has been as active, as in fisheries, in forestry, in great works of engineering, in vast mining operations; and from the seas, the earth, the mountain sides, our laborers are wresting annually from nature a stupendous return in wealth.

Our progress in the industries has been aided and inspired by an equal progress in educational facilities, and the intellectual development of our people has kept pace with their material advance. The United States spends more money for the education of its youth than any other country in the world, and among her institutions the school-house and the college stand most prominent. While the lower education has been abundantly attended to, the higher education has been by no means neglected, and amply endowed colleges and universities are found in every State and in almost every city of the land. In addition to the school-house, libraries are multiplying with rapidity, art galleries and museums of science are rising everywhere, temples to music and the drama are found in all our cities, the press is turning out books and newspapers with almost abnormal energy, and in everything calculated to enhance the intelligence of the people the United States has no superior, if any equal, among the nations of the earth.

It may seem unnecessary to tell the people of the United States the story of their growth. The greatness to which this nation has attained is too evident to need to be put in words. It has, in fact, been made evident in two great and a multitude of smaller exhibitions in which the marvels of American progress have been shown, either by themselves or in contrast with those of foreign lands. The first of these, the Centennial Exposition of 1876, had a double effect: it opened our eyes at once to our triumphs and our deficiencies, to the particulars in which we excelled and those in which we were inferior to foreign peoples. In the next great exhibition, that at Chicago in 1893, we had the satisfaction to perceive, not only that we had made great progress in our points of superiority, but had worked nobly and heartily to overcome our defects, and were able to show ourselves the equal of Europe in almost every field of human thought and skill. In architecture a vision of beauty was shown such as the world had never before seen, and in the general domain of art the United States no longer had need to be ashamed of what it had to show.

And now, having briefly summed up the steps of progress of the United States, I may close with some consideration of the problem which we confront in our new position as the Greater Republic, the lord of islands spread widely over the seas. Down to the year 1898 this country held a position of isolation, so far as its political interests were concerned. Although the sails of its merchant ships whitened every sea and its commerce extended to all lands, its boundaries were confined to the North American continent, its political activities largely to American interests. Jealous of any intrusion by foreign nations upon this hemisphere, it warned them off, while still in its feeble youth, by the stern words of the Monroe doctrine, and has since shown France and England, by decisive measures, that this doctrine is more than an empty form of words.