n unprofitable. It placed
immigrants where the steamboat, canal, and road could at last be of the
highest utility to them; it developed the great West with startling
rapidity; it increased the sale of government lands so rapidly that in a
few years the debt of the United States was paid off, and the surplus
became, for the first time, a source of political embarrassment. In a
few years further, aided by revolutionary troubles in Europe,
immigration became a great stream, which poured into and altered the
conditions of every part of the North and West. The stream was
altogether nationalizing in its nature. The immigrant came to the United
States, not to a particular State. To him, the country was greater than
any State; even that of his adoption. Labor conditions excluded the
South from this element of progress also. Not only were the railroads of
the South hampered in every point by the old difficulty of slave labor;
immigration and free labor shunned slave soil as if the plague were
there prevalent. Year after year the North and West became more national
in their prejudices and modes of thought and action; while the South
remained little changed, except by a natural reactionary drift toward a
more extreme colonialism. The natural result, in the next period was the
development of a quasi nationality in the South itself.

The introduction of the railway had brought its own difficulties, though
these were not felt severely until after years. In the continent of
Europe, the governments carefully retained their powers of eminent
domain when the new system was introduced. The necessary land was loaned
to the railways for a term of years, at the expiration of which the
railway was to revert to the State; and railway troubles were
non-existent, or comparatively tractable. In the United States, as in
Great Britain, free right of incorporation was supplemented by what was
really a gift of the power of eminent domain. The necessary land became
the property of the corporations in fee, and it has been found almost
equally difficult to revoke the gift or to introduce a railway control.

Democracy took a new and extreme line of development under its alliance
with nationality. As the dominant party, about 1827-8, became divided
into two parties, the new parties felt the democratic influence as
neither of their predecessors had felt it. Nominations, which had been
made by cliques of legislators or Congressmen, began to be made by
popu