Earlier in these pages a description is given of the empty continent which lay open to settlement by the British stock on both sides of the Canadian border.
Let us see what use was made of this opportunity in the period from the end of Colonial times to the Civil War.
A continent was occupied and the territory of the Union was swept westward to the Pacific. The forests were cut down and the wild life destroyed. The Indians were evicted. The mineral wealth of the western mountains was ransacked. The coal was exploited, and the once fertile soil of the Southern States greatly depleted through the reckless growing of tobacco and cotton. Waste was the order of the day in America.
All this was perhaps inevitable, but never since Cæsar plundered Gaul has so large a territory been sacked in so short a time. Probably no more destructive human being has ever appeared on the world stage than the American pioneer with his axe and his rifle.
In 1860, at the end of this period, we find the essential elements of national unity still unchanged, but we were about to engage in a fratricidal war, which was to destroy the best blood of the nation. We had admitted large numbers of Irish and German immigrants who impaired, in the case of the Irish, our religious system and introduced certain undesirable racial elements. The Germans who came were largely Protestants and only temporarily disturbed our unity by clinging to their foreign language. Both of these elements, however, were pre-dominantly Nordic, and it was not until the next and final period that the unassimilable Alpines and Mediterraneans came here from southern and eastern Europe. The tragedy of the Civil War and the introduction of cheap labor were still to come, so that in 1860 the United States was at its high-water mark of national unity.
The Indians had been ruthlessly swept aside, as was unavoidable because a few hunting tribes could not be allowed to possess a continent, but the Negro question could have been postponed, and the men who died needlessly on Southern battle-fields could have been used to populate the States of the Far West.
In the next chapter we shall study the swamping of this American civilization, which reached its zenith in 1860.