cracy. The railroads, with their fragile iron rails, their
little wheezy locomotives, their wooden bridges, their unheated coaches,
and their kerosene lamps, fairly typified the prevailing frontier
business and economic organization. But only by talking with the
business leaders of that time could we have understood the changes that
have taken place in fifty years. For the most part we speak a business
language which our fathers and grandfathers would not have comprehended.
The word "trust" had not become a part of their vocabulary; "restraint
of trade" was a phrase which only the antiquarian lawyer could
have interpreted; "interlocking directorates," "holding companies,"
"subsidiaries," "underwriting syndicates," and "community of
interest"--all this jargon of modern business would have signified
nothing to our immediate ancestors. Our nation of 1865 was a nation of
farmers, city artisans, and industrious, independent business men, and
small-scale manufacturers. Millionaires, though they were not unknown,
did not swarm all over the land. Luxury, though it had made great
progress in the latter years of the war, had not become the American
standard of well-being. The industrial story of the United States in
the last fifty years is the story of the most amazing economic
transformation that the world has ever known; a change which is fitly
typified in the evolution of the independent oil driller of western
Pennsylvania into the Standard Oil Company, and of the ancient open
air forge on the banks of the Allegheny into the United States Steel
Corporation.

The slow, unceasing ages had been accumulating a priceless inheritance
for the American people. Nearly all of their natural resources, in
1865, were still lying fallow, and even undiscovered in many instances.
Americans had begun, it is true, to exploit their more obvious, external
wealth, their forests and their land; the first had made them one of
the world's two greatest shipbuilding nations, while the second had
furnished a large part of the resources that had enabled the Federal
Government to fight what was, up to that time, the greatest war in
history. But the extensive prairie plains whose settlement was to
follow the railroad extensions of the sixties and the seventies--Kansas,
Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, Minnesota, the Dakotas--had been only slightly
penetrated. This region, with a rainfall not too abundant and not too
scanty, with a cultivable soil extending from e