As once the West had sought to secede, now at length the South, foster-mother of the West, bethought herself to set up a separate land, even at the very time when there was in progress a great transcontinental project that was to make all this country one, forever and inseparable. It was the Civil War that delayed the construction of the Pacific railway. Had that road been built, had the roads from the North into the South been built half a generation earlier, there could never have been any Civil War. The indissoluble brotherhood of the North and the South would have been established a generation before, and at what untold saving of splendid human life! This war, fatally and fatefully early—early by a quarter of a century, since after that quarter-century it could never have attained importance, or could never have been at all—changed history in America more than any written history has ever shown. Still curiously and intimately connected, it was the South and the West that were to suffer most in that war, cruel as this may sound to that splendid East that poured its blood like water and its treasure with a freedom the West might not equal. The industrial revolution of the West was subsequent to the Civil War, and was, to large extent, caused by the Civil War, or, rather, was dependent upon the same conditions that had part in bringing forth that war. The vast and virgin West, “confessedly but little known,” lay waiting for a population. The Eastern portion of the Northern States had its own population. The South, under the conditions of that day, offered incalculably more opportunity for crude labor than did the West; but it offered no security for either capital or labor. Therefore it was that the Old World was called upon to furnish the raw labor requisite to subdue this wild land. It can be only with horror that we reflect that the Old World was called upon also to furnish us a people to replace the more than half-million dead of as grand a population as the world ever knew, the flower of America, North, South, East, and West. It would have been this splendid army of men that would have settled the West, had it not been for the war, which a few years later would have been an impossible thing. Could that half-million dead have arisen from the grave in the decade following that truly cruel war, the nomenclature of many Western cities would be different to-day, and the face of the census maps would show a different story. To-day the whole upper portion of the population chart of the United States is black with the indication of a foreign-born population. The only part of this country that the census map dares call American is a thin, wavering line along the plateaus of Tennessee and Kentucky,—the land that the first adventurers sought out when they crossed the Alleghanies. It is the South alone that is to-day American. It was the South that gave us the new-American, that splendid figure in the history of the world.