Cartoon by J. W. Bengough The Great Pair of American Tires [Commercial and Land "Single Tacks" will puncture both INTRODUCTION OUR PHYSICAL BONDS OF UNION: THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND INTERSTATE COMMERCE T HE problem which lay before the United States in 1789 was in many respects a unique one. The federal governments of earlier times-in Greece and in Switzerland, for instance-had been charged with the duty of making nations out of elements that already existed. The statesmen of America had to create the elements as well as to unite them. The territory of which the United States found itself in possession at that time was underpopulated to an extraordinary degree. Never, perhaps, in the recent history of the world has so large and fertile an area supported so small a population as was the case in North America under the dominion of the Indian tribes. These peoples were so backward in industry that they could neither multiply their own numbers nor amalgamate with higher races, while at the same time they were so forward in the arts of war that they had contrived to exterminate all the higher civilizations with which they had come in contact until the advent of the white men from Europe. The men who settled the United States found much land but little labor or capital. The country presented a clean sheet on which the statesman gifted with industrial knowledge and industrial vision might write what he pleased. Other nations have always been face to face with the question how they should make their land support their population. The United States during the first century 1 of its existence was dealing with the opposite question: how to get a population which should occupy and utilize the land. Natural resources were abundant; labor was scarce. How should we get this labor? We might, of course, have trusted to the natural increase of our own numbers. But this policy would have involved private loss and public danger; private loss, by preventing the development of trade and trade centers; public danger, by leaving the Western land so long unoccupied that it would have tempted the English to send colonies up the St. Lawrence and the Spaniards or French to send them up the Mississippi. Under such circumstances the United States would have found the back country taken out of their hands before they knew it, and the most fertile parts of the continent occupied by alien, if not hostile, powers. It was necessary for us to attract the labor of Europe by the offer of free lands, abundant business opportunities, and an early participation in the rights of American citizenship; it was almost equally necessary to give the population which settled the new territory access to markets on the seacoast and in Europe by a proper system of internal communications. Dominant in the financial policy of the Administration at the beginning of the history of the United States was Alexander Hamilton; and Hamilton, more than any of his contemporaries, saw the possibility of using industrial policy to make a nation great. He laid down the principle, which was accepted at the time and never has been abandoned, that the public domain should be used, not primarily for the profit of the Government, but with a view to the settlement and sound development of the country as a whole. In pursuance of this policy the United States gave direct encouragement to the settler by a series of preemption, homestead, and timber culture acts; and it gave indirect encouragement to the development of the country by grants of land in favor of schools and colleges on the one hand and of canals and railroads on the other. It was the railroad land grants which, for good and for ill, furnished the most distinctive feature in the com mercial policy of the United States. More important to our country than its foreign trade, or indeed than any other part of its industrial development, was the growth of its internal commerce. Our large extent of territory and our sparse population gave this matter of domestic trade and exchange an importance which it probably possessed nowhere else. Without facilities for internal commerce the country was bound to remain a nation of clans, very slightly advanced in economic civilization; prosperous, indeed, to this extent, that the people would have plenty of land and abundant supplies of food, but unprosperous when measured by the range of comforts that they could enjoy or the opportunities for progress for themselves and their children. Politically, also, the development of internal trade was as necessary as it was industrially. Without it the United States would remain a number of disconnected provinces, bound to fall apart by their own weight as soon as occasion should arise. A good system of internal communication would bind these separate units together as nothing else could do. Under these circumstances the leading American statesmen of all parties, whatever their theories of government, favored practical measures for the development of internal trade. George Washington foresaw the importance of canal communication in the development of the United States. DeWitt Clinton devoted his public life to this development, and by so doing placed on a secure basis his own reputation as a statesman and the industrial prosperity of his State. Albert Gallatin and John C. Calhoun, though differing in many of their constitutional theories, were united in their wish that the Government should establish an efficient system of post roads, and have left their views on record in two of the most masterly documents in the whole series of American state papers.1 When railroads were invented the matter became even more vital and urgent. To other countries the railroad was in some sense a luxury. It enabled communities which were already well developed to exchange their 1 American State Papers, XX, 724; XXI, 533, |