r year by year.
Prosperity, greater than the country had ever known, prevailed
everywhere in the North throughout the last two years of the War.

So, too, feeding and supplying an army of millions of men laid the
foundation of many of our greatest industries. The Northern soldiers in
the early days of the war were clothed in garments so variegated
that they sometimes had trouble in telling friend from foe, and not
infrequently they shot at one another; so inadequately were our woolen
mills prepared to supply their uniforms! But larger government contracts
enabled the proprietors to reconstruct their mills, install modern
machines, and build up an organization and a prosperous business that
still endures. Making boots and shoes for Northern soldiers laid the
foundation of America's great shoe industry. Machinery had already been
applied to shoe manufacture, but only to a limited extent; under the
pressure of war conditions, however, American inventive skill found ways
of performing mechanically almost all the operations that had formerly
been done by hand. The McKay sewing machine, one of the greatest of our
inventions, which was perfected in the second year of the war, did as
much perhaps as any single device to keep our soldiers well shod and
comfortable. The necessity of feeding these same armies created our
great packing plants. Though McCormick had invented his reaper several
years before the war, the new agricultural machinery had made no great
headway. Without this machinery, however, our Western farmers could
never have harvested the gigantic crops which not only fed our soldiers
but laid the basis of our economic prosperity. Thus the War directly
established one of the greatest, and certainly one of the most romantic,
of our industries--that of agricultural machinery.

Above all, however, the victory at Appomattox threw upon the country
more than a million unemployed men. Our European critics predicted
that their return to civil life would produce dire social and political
consequences. But these critics were thinking in terms of their own
countries; they failed to consider that the United States had an immense
unoccupied domain which was waiting for development. The men who
fought the Civil War had demonstrated precisely the adventurous, hardy
instincts which were most needed in this great enterprise. Even before
the War ended, a great immigration started towards the mines and farms
of the trans-Mississippi co