The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting of vast numbers of the population from a position of productiveness to one of dependence. A people who knew only peace and who were totally untrained even in the idea of war were called upon suddenly to furnish one of the largest armies of modern times and to fight to an end the most bitterly contested conflict of a century. First and last, upwards of two millions of men, the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn all of them from the most efficient productive class, were mustered into the federal service alone. It changed in a moment the entire equilibrium of American industrial life. This great unproductive army had to be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously wasteful occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great transportation systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the regiments. The wheatfields had no harvesters; the Mississippi the great commercial outlet of the West, had been closed by the war, and the railroads were insufficient to handle the burden. The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a change in the North that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers in the harvest fields of the Middle West called for machinery, and the reaper and the mowing machine for the first time sprang into widespread use; the strain upon the railroads brought increased energy and efficiency and capital to bear upon the problem of transportation, and it was swiftly solved. Great meat-packing houses arose to meet the new conditions; shoes had to be sent to the front in enormous numbers and to produce them a new and marvelous machine was brought into use; clothing in hitherto unheard-of quantities must be manufactured and sent speedily, and to make it Howe's sewing machine was evolved. It was a period of giant tasks thrust suddenly upon a people seemingly unprepared. The vision of the country became all at once enlarged. Companies were organized for colossal undertakings. Values and wealth arose by leaps and bounds. Nothing seemed impossible. The war educated America. It educated first the millions of men who were enrolled in the armies. With few exceptions the soldiers were boys who had never before left their native neighborhoods. From the provincial little round of the farm or the shop, all in a moment they plunged into regions that to them were veritable foreign lands to live in a world of excitement and stress, with ever-shifting scenes and ever-deepening responsibilities, for three and four and even five years. Whole armies of young men came from the remote hills of New England. Massachusetts alone sent 159,000. The diffident country lad was trained harshly in the roughest of classrooms. He was forced to measure himself with men.