d institutions reached
the eighties and began to place events in their true proportion. Then it
appeared that there was in fact a fundamental economic problem and that
the political issues of the decade faced it from various angles.

The United States had nearly reached its greatest capacity in production
by 1880, and was no longer able to consume its output. Through its first
century there had been a rough plenty everywhere,--enough food, enough
work, and free land,--so that the industrious citizen need never go
hungry, although he was rarely able to acquire great wealth. Men had
worked with their own hands and with the labor of their beasts of
burden, as men had ever worked. Their land had appeared, indeed, to be
the land of opportunity. Population had doubled itself in a short
generation, and America had called upon the oppressed of Europe to aid
in reclaiming the plains and forests. With all the labor and
opportunity, there had rarely been either an overproduction or a lack of
work.

The industrial revolution changed the nature of American society in many
directions. Through an improved system of communication, whose results
were first visible between 1857 and 1873, it had broadened the realm to
be exploited, brought the rich plains of the West into agricultural
competition with the Middle West and the East, and enabled an increased
production of staples by lessening freights and widening the area of
choice. As the result of rapid communication grain, cotton, and food
animals increased more rapidly than population. The use of manures and a
more careful agriculture on the smaller farms--and all the farms were
growing smaller--further swelled the productivity of the individual
farmer.

Machinery increased the capacity of the laborer as transportation
widened his choice of home. The factories, as they were reorganized in
the new period of prosperity, found that invention had lessened the need
for labor and increased the product. Machine tools in agriculture, in
iron and steel, in textiles, in shoemaking, rendered the course of
manufacture nearly automatic, and when steam neared its limit in
dexterity active minds could see electricity holding out a new promise.

In 1880 population and the capacity to consume American products were
growing less rapidly than the power to produce. The United States was
finding every year greater difficulty in selling all its output. It was
possible to foresee the day when overproducti