party
histories, the best are F. Curtis, _The Republican Party_, (2 vols.,
1904), and W.L. Wilson, _The National Democratic Party_ (1888). J.H.
Harper recounts details of the Mugwump split in his history of _The
House of Harper_ (1912). The standard compilation on the pension system,
which has not yet received adequate treatment, is W.H. Glasson,
_Military Pension Legislation in the United States_ (in Columbia
University Studies, vol. XII). C.F. Adams and W.B. Hale published useful
essays on the pension system in _World's Work, 1911_. H.T. Peck begins
his popular _Twenty Years of the Republic_ (1907) with the inauguration
of Cleveland in 1885. Consult also Sparks, Dewey, Andrews, and the
_Annual Cyclopaedia_.

CHAPTER IX

THE LAST OF THE FRONTIER

Five statutes that received the signature of Grover Cleveland are
documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the
National Administration during the eighties. They indicate that the
chief function of the National Government had ceased to be to moderate
among a group of self-sufficient States and had come to be the direction
of such interests as were national in importance or extent. On February
4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Law was passed in recognition of a
transportation system that had become national; and four days later the
Dawes Bill, providing that lands should be issued to Indians in
severalty, marked the disappearance of the wild Indian from the border.
In 1889 a Department of Agriculture, with a seat in the Cabinet, and a
law for the survey of irrigation sites in the Far West, mark the
interest of a nation in the prosperity of its whole area and population;
while laws of 1889 and 1890 admitting six new States extended the chain
of commonwealths for the first time from ocean to ocean. A process that
had been under way since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock had culminated in
the occupation of the whole breadth of the continent.

The first continental railroad, the Union Pacific, chartered in 1862
and finished in 1869, was admittedly a national project. Its purpose was
to bind the Pacific Slope to the East in a period when sectionalism was
a menace to national unity. Its opening was the first step in the
completion of an intricate system of lines extending to the Pacific.
Direct federal aid was given to the road in the form of land grants,
right of way, and a loan of bonds.

Other continental railroads were authorized in the later sixt