ight inches to twenty
feet under the ground, with hardly a rock in its whole extent, with
scarcely a tree, except where it bordered on the streams, has been
pronounced by competent scientists the finest farming country to
which man has ever set the plow. Our mineral wealth was likewise lying
everywhere ready to the uses of the new generation. The United States
now supplies the world with half its copper, but in 1865 it was
importing a considerable part of its own supply. It was not till
1859 that the first "oil gusher" of western Pennsylvania opened up an
entirely new source of wealth. Though we had the largest coal
deposits known to geologists, we were bringing large supplies of this
indispensable necessity from Nova Scotia. It has been said that coal
and iron are the two mineral products that have chiefly affected modern
civilization. Certainly the nations that have made the greatest progress
industrially and commercially--England, Germany, America--are the three
that possess these minerals in largest amount. From sixty to seventy
per cent of all the known coal deposits in the world were located in our
national domain. Nature had given no other nation anything even remotely
comparable to the four hundred and eighty square miles of anthracite in
western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Enormous fields of bituminous
lay in those Appalachian ranges extending from Pennsylvania to Alabama,
in Michigan, in the Rocky Mountains, and in the Pacific regions. In
speaking of our iron it is necessary to use terms that are even more
extravagant. From colonial times Americans had worked the iron ore
plentifully scattered along the Atlantic coast, but the greatest field
of all, that in Minnesota, had not been scratched. From the settlement
of the country up to 1869 it had mined only 50,000,000 tons of iron
ore, while up to 1910 we had produced 685,000,000 tons. The streams and
waterfalls that, in the next sixty years, were to furnish the power
that would light our cities, propel our street-cars, drive our
transcontinental trains across the mountains, and perform numerous
domestic services, were running their useless courses to the sea.

Industrial America is a product of the decades succeeding the Civil
War; yet even in 1865 we were a large manufacturing nation. The leading
characteristic of our industries, as compared with present conditions,
was that they were individualized. Nearly all had outgrown the household
stage, the factory