away. The United States had
become a nation because it could not avoid it. Even the Congregational
churches, with whom parish autonomy was vital, had seen fit to erect a
National Council. Every important activity of trade had become national,
and the only agency that retained its old localism was the law, which
must cope with the new order. In many ways the trust problem was the
result of an inadequate legal system which left a wide "twilight zone"
between the local capacity of the State and the activity of the Nation.
Yet the Nation was unfolding and expanding its powers. Railroad control,
immigration and labor control, agricultural experiment, irrigation, and
reclamation were only samples of the new lines of activity that created
new administrative machinery and advanced abreast of the new idea of
appointment because of merit and tenure during good behavior. Men who
continued to see the center of political gravity in the State
Governments were behind the times.

An indigenous literature was rising in the United States. Dickens had
lived long enough to recognize the spirit of a new school in _The Luck
of Roaring Camp_, and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, which appeared in
1868. Before 1890 the fame of their author, Bret Harte, was secure.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), too, had seen the native field
and had exploited it. The New England school, Emerson and Longfellow,
Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, lived into or through the eighties, but
were less robust in their American flavor than their younger
contemporaries who picked subjects from the border. _Tom Sawyer_,
_Huckleberry Finn_, and the _Connecticut Yankee_ were life as well as
art. Another writer of the generation, William Dean Howells, gave _The
Rise of Silas Lapham_ to the world in 1885, and revealed a different
stratum of the new society, while the vogue of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_
tells less of the life therein described than of the outlook of American
readers.

Pure literature was in 1890 turning more and more to American subjects;
applied literature was searching for causes and explanations. The
writings of Henry George, particularly his _Progress and Poverty_,
brought him from obscurity to prominence in six years, and by 1885 had
"formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought." The
success of Bellamy's utopian romance proved the avidity of the reading
public. Parkman and Bancroft, of the older generation, Henry Adams,
McMaster, and Rho