expenditures of the United
States from 1850 to 1860 were under $60,000,000; they ranged between
1880 to 1890 from $244,000,000 to $297,000,000 without exhausting the
supply. Yearly, despite the heavy drains upon it, a surplus accumulated
to the embarrassment of the Government and the demoralization of
Congress. The aggregate accumulation for ten years was over
$1,000,000,000.

The disbursements of the United States were growing at a higher rate
than its population, though this was keeping up the traditions of a new
country. From 31,443,321 inhabitants, with which the nation faced the
Civil War in 1860, it had grown to 38,558,371 in 1870, and it was now,
in 1880, 50,155,783. In mobility and activity it had increased even more
rapidly than this, for it was served by nearly three times as many miles
of railway (87,000) in 1880 as when the war broke out. Along the old
frontier the percentage figures for population and railway mileage were
highest, but everywhere a larger population was moving more actively,
and studying itself more intently than ever before. It was also
generating more internal friction than ever. In the silver mines at
Leadville in 1878 had occurred one of the great forerunners of economic
clash. This had been preceded in 1877 by the railway strikes of
Pennsylvania and the East. In California, Dennis Kearney and the Irish
were driving the Chinese from society in the interest of "America for
Americans." The murders by the "Molly Maguires" had brought condign
punishment upon the lawless in the anthracite region; and throughout the
East men were vaguely conscious of a secret society that called itself
the Knights of Labor.

Complexity, class interest, and the problems at once of labor and of
capital, thrust themselves upon a society that had occupied its
continent and used most of its free land. The Centennial had revived the
study of American history from patriotic reasons. An intense interest in
self-analysis now kept this alive, as Henry Adams, James Schouler, and
John Bach McMaster devoted themselves to a scrutiny of historic facts,
as colleges began to create chairs of American history, as James Ford
Rhodes retired from his office to his study to write the history of his
own times. In the next few years associations for the study of political
economy, political science, sociology, and history multiplied the
testimonies to the existence of a new nation.

It was many years before the study of history an