s. The farmer began to give up his slaughtering and
butter-making, as he had already abandoned his spinning and weaving, and
devoted himself more exclusively to raising crops. Here, too, the
mechanical improvements touched his life. Agricultural machinery was
coming into general use, while the new railroads carried off his produce
to the great markets which the rising cities created.

The number of employees of American factories increased more than half
between 1860 and 1870, while the capital invested and the goods turned
out were more than doubled. The United States was for the first time
looking to a day when all the ordinary necessities of life could be made
within its limits. At Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, and a host of cities in the interior, men were not
disturbed by the war in their attempt to exploit the abundant resources
of the continent. The manufacture of food began to shift from the
household to the city factory, to the advantage of the cities lying near
the great fresh areas of farm lands. The flour mills of the Northwest,
the meat-packing establishments at Chicago and elsewhere, the
distilleries of central Illinois, utilized the agricultural staples and
transformed them for export. The presence of factories forced upon the
city governments, East and West, already embarrassed by the pains of
rapid growth, the problems of police power and good government. Charters
written for semi-rural villages were inadequate when the villages became
cities.

Clothing, no less than food, passed into the factory, thanks to Elias
Howe and his sewing-machine and the shoe machinery of McKay. Before the
war the influences of this change were visible in the increasing demand
for cotton. Now came the great growth of the textile regions of the
East, around Fall River and Philadelphia, and of the shoe factories in
the Lynn district.

The use and manufacture of machines gave new stimulus to those regions
where coal and iron, placed conveniently with reference to
transportation, had fixed the location of smelters and rolling-mills. In
the middle of the sixties Henry Bessemer's commercial process for the
manufacture of steel marks the beginning of a revolution in the
construction of railroads and bridges, as well as in public and private
architecture. Pittsburg became the heart of the steel industry, and the
young men who controlled it fixed their hands upon the commercial future
of the United States. The