t 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