America in Ferment (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1915 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV THE BLOOD OF THE NATION Moee than half a century ago Macaulay wrote to an American friend regarding American conditions: "Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World. Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometime out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test." Notwithstanding our vast area and marvelous resources, there are many sections of America that have already begun to justify the great historian's remarkable prediction. Our "boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land" is virtually exhausted and valuable quarter sections can no longer be had for the mere entering. Wages are not so low as in the old world, but they fluctuate as much and the cost of living is higher. We have our Manchesters and Birminghams and it is not an unknown thing for hundreds of thousands of our artisans to be out of work. And undoubtedly our institutions are being subjected to a closer scrutiny by a dissatisfied, not to say disillusioned, people than ever before.; If the population of the United States were better distributed geographically and industrially, such a condition of affairs need not exist. But it does exist, and many of its causes are obvious. About sixtyfive millions of our people, or almost three-fourths of the whole number in the United States proper, reside in the region east of the Mississippi, although that region is less than one-third of our total cont...