After the nation had defended its independence and consolidated its union, its first effort was to develop and extend its territory. It was little more than a string of widely separated settlements along the Atlantic coast. Some one has called it a country without an interior. The history of the pioneers who pushed over the mountains of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, into the forests of Tennessee and Kentucky, into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and so on to the broad rolling prairies of the West, is not without an interest to those who feel the essential romance of the human will in a world of intractable things. The transformation of the Indian's hunting trail into the highroad, with its train of creaking, white-topped wagons, and of the highroad into the railway, with its incessant, swift-rushing caravans of passengers and freight; the growth of enormous cities like Chicago and St. Louis in places that three generations ago were a habitation for wild geese and foxes; the harnessing of swift and mighty rivers to turn the wheels of innumerable factories; the passing of the Great American Desert, which once occupied the centre of our map, into the pasture-ground of countless flocks and herds, and the grain-field where the bread grows for many nations,--all this, happening in a hundred years, has an air of enchantment about it. What wonder that the American people have been fascinated, perhaps even a little intoxicated, by the effect of their own will-power? In 1850 they were comparatively a poor people, with only $7,000,000,000 of national wealth, less than $308 _per capita_. In 1906 they had become a rich people, with $107,000,000,000 of national wealth, more than $1300 _per capita_. In 1850 they manufactured $1,000,000,000 worth of goods, in 1906 $14,000,000,000 worth. In 1850 they imported $173,000,000 worth of merchandise and exported $144,000,000 worth. In 1906 the figures had changed to $1,700,000,000 of merchandise exports and $1,200,000,000 of imports. That is to say, in one year America sold to other nations six dollars' worth _per capita_ more than she needed to buy from them.