The continent, however, was not so limited. It stretched nearly three thousand miles further. It was incredibly rich. Following the Revolution, piece after piece of it, at intervals, came into the hands of the descendants of those eighteenth century colonials, men quite as much as women, who had begun to interest themselves in painting, literature, drama, and music. The wealth to be made out of the West, a constantly retreating West for more than a century, began to act as a magnet on men’s minds and ambitions. Following the poorer classes who went as hunters and settlers, there appear the agents of merchants, bankers, and speculators. Astor made a fortune in furs. Others in lands. Others in yet more ways. The craze for getting fabulously rich quickly spread. The perpetual boom, broken only by sharp crises,[Pg 253] in which America has since lived, began. The nascent civilization on the seaboard became violently deflected from its course. Scientific inventions succeeded one another, and with every new method of transportation—canal, good roads, steamboat, railroad—every new method of mining, every new product to be utilized, every new foreign market opened, the rush to win riches by raping a continent became madder and madder. It was not a question of preparing a continent for habitation. It was one of money-maddened men furiously wrenching wealth from it in every way their ingenuity and greed could devise—from the land, from the forests above it, from the mines below it. Like hogs at a trough, each man guzzled as hard as he could, regardless of all else, lest some other hog should get ahead of him. In Germany they have been rafting logs for a thousand years. The carefully tended and replanted forests may well last for a thousand more. Rafting on the Mississippi began, flourished, and was finished in seventy years. About 1840 the American people as a nation owned forty billion feet of standing lumber contiguous to the river and its tributaries. In seventy years private individuals and companies had stripped the land of this magnificent heritage without replacing a single tree. This was not “the task of subduing a wilderness to make it habitable.” It was the madness of lust—the meanest of all lusts, the lust for money. To-day America is fairly glutted with wealth. It is useless to enumerate the statistics—an advertising expenditure of a billion dollars a year, savings deposits of twenty-eight billions, two hundred and twenty-eight individuals reporting incomes of over a million a year each, a national income of ninety billions. [Pg 254] IV