Augur of what might have been, but for our Civil War, was that long line of white-topped wagons that streamed westward across Illinois, Iowa, across the Missouri River, out into the West, the still glorious and alluring West, immediately upon the close of the war. This was not an influx of foreigners, but a hejira of native Americans, a flood-tide that could not wait for the railroads that were now so swiftly taking up the new and mighty problems of a convalescent country. “By an impulse, providential or evolutionary, but irresistible,” said an American statesman of that decade,[55] “civilization has, during the present generation, moved all at once and in concert, in a process of territorial expansion as sudden and inexplicable as that which at the close of the fifteenth century impelled the nations of Europe to voyages which, resulted in the discovery and occupation of America. . . . The United States will command the greatest part of the trade with the Chinese Orient. We can produce every article that can be sold in this now and limitless market.” Not bad reiteration, this, of the prophecy of our historian of 1855. The latter did not foresee our Civil War, nor could he have foreseen our armies across seas. They are there not so much by reason of political mistakes or political wisdom as by an impulse “providential or evolutionary.” In 1865, upon the plains, or in 1900, in the Asian islands, the army was only the escort. It is not our army that will conquer new provinces and create new opportunities in place of those with which we have been so sadly careless and so lavishly generous; it is our railways and our steamships that are to prove our conquering agencies. Thereby we shall recoup ourselves at the coffers of the world. We lose all sentimental regrets and superficial reservations when we come to examine closely the tremendous revolutions created by the genius of modern transportation. With the era of steam came a complete reversal of all earlier methods. For nearly a century following the Revolutionary War the new lands of America had waited upon the transportation. Now the transportation facilities were to overleap history and to run in advance of progress itself. The railroad was not to depend upon the land, but the land upon the railroad. It was strong faith in the future civilization that enabled capitalists to build one connected line of iron from Oregon down the Pacific coast, thence east of the mouth of the Father of Waters, in all over thirty-two hundred miles of rail. Then came that daring flight of the Santa Fé across the seas of sand, a venture derided as folly and recklessness.