newest of industries, the trade in petroleum
and its oils, reached fifteen millions in Pittsburg alone in 1864.

The trunk-line railways with their spurs and branches adjusted
themselves early in the war to the new direction of business currents.
They then began to carry the new inhabitants into the cities, the new
manufactures to their markets, and to press upon iron, coal, and timber
for their own supplies. Men of business laid the foundations of huge
fortunes in supplying the new and growing demands. The stock company,
with negotiable shares and bonds, made it possible for the small
investor to share in the larger commercial profits and losses.

The growth and elaboration of companies and commerce were projected upon
a legal system that was most accustomed to small enterprises and local
trade. Not only had the corporations to establish customs and precedents
among themselves, but courts, legislatures, and city councils had to
face the need for an amplification of American law. The speed with which
the new life swept upon the country, the inexperience of both business
men and jurists, the public ignorance of the extent to which the
revolution was to go, and the cross-purposes inevitable when States
tried to regulate the affairs of corporations larger than themselves,
make it unnecessary to search further for the key to the confusing
half-century that followed the Civil War.

The rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation, urban life, and
business law that came with the prosperity of the early sixties gave to
these years an appearance of materialism that has misled many observers.
None of the developments received full contemporary notice, for war
filled the front pages of the newspapers. The men who directed them were
not under scrutiny, and could hardly fail to bring into business and
speculation that main canon of war time that the end is everything and
that it justifies the means. But though war was not the sole American
occupation between 1861 and 1865, and though a new industrial revolution
was begun, material things often gave way in the American mind to
altruistic concepts and the service of the ideal.

Congress endowed the agricultural colleges in the early years of the
war, and the state universities, though thinned by the enlistment of
their boys, established themselves. The creation of new universities,
the endowment of older foundations, and the beginning of an education
that should fit not only fo