The boy or girl in
a textile mill often worked only a few years to save money, buy a
farm, or to enter some business or profession.
The steamboat now, wherever there was navigable water, and the
railroad, for a large part of the way, offered transportation to
the boundless West. Steamboats traversed all the larger rivers
and the lakes. The railroad was growing rapidly. Its lines had
extended to more than thirty thousand miles. Construction went on
during the war, and the transcontinental railway was in sight.
The locomotive had approached standardization, and the American
railway car was in form similar to that of the present day,
though not so large, so comfortable, or so strong. The Pullman
car, from which has developed the chair car, the dining car, and
the whole list of special cars, was in process of development,
and the automatic air brake of George Westinghouse was soon to
follow.
Thus far had the nation progressed in invention and industry
along the lines of peaceful development. But with the Civil War
came a sudden and tremendous advance. No result of the Civil War,
political or social, has more profoundly affected American life
than the application to the farm, as a war necessity, of
machinery on a great scale. So long as labor was plentiful and
cheap, only a comparatively few farmers could be interested in
expensive machinery, but when the war called the young men away
the worried farmers gladly turned to the new machines and found
that they were able not only to feed the Union, but also to
export immense quantities of wheat to Europe, even during the
war.
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