A settler who moved, in 1854, from Virginia to Iowa complained that for a whole year in that frontier country he saw no fruit except a half-peck of crab-apples. It was much the same in Minnesota at that time; yet, in the year 1900, the city of St. Paul alone used one thousand dollars' worth or grapes each day for fifty days, all imported, and at an average price of only fifteen cents per basket. This fruit was largely imported from the state of New York.
In the year 1900 began the great tendency toward consolidation in railway interests. Nor did the sequence cease at this point. In the same year there were begun, for use upon the Pacific Ocean in connection with this same transcontinental route, five giant ocean-going freight ships, the largest yet known, each to be 750 feet in length, of 74 feet beam, and with a carrying capacity of 22,000 tons. These ships will carry American cotton to Japan, for use instead of the short-staple cotton of India, until recently used by Japan. They will enable the railroad-builders of Japan to figure as exactly on the price of a ton of rails as can the contractor of Kansas or Nebraska. They will lay down a barrel of Minnesota flour in China or the Philippines at a cost for carriage of not over $1.25. All this shows to what extent American commerce, made active by American transportation methods, is invading the markets of the world; for, at this same time, Russia can not lay down a barrel of (an inferior) flour at the seaboard of China for less than $4.25. Surely our prophet of 1855 dreamed more wisely than he knew!
The desecration of America, in the terrible devastation of her forests, is something no observant man can face with composure.
The time is not one for individual optimism, and the old hopefully self-reliant spirit of the West must be content to lose its personal quality in the larger and vaguer, though not less certain, tendencies of modern life. Bearing upon a theme kindred to the above, James Bryce, author of "The American Commonwealth," recently found occasion to write:
"National ideals to-day tend toward a large and strong state, with vast external possessions, with a huge army and navy, with an extending trade, and great consequent wealth; and the ideal of education is less toward 'unprofitable culture' and more toward subjects that enable men to raise themselves in the world. People now talk more about capital and labor. Formerly there seemed rather more faith in the power of reason, rather more hope of progress to be secured by political change. Altogether there seemed rather more of a sanguine spirit formerly. Mankind must never cease to cherish and follow the dream of that golden age, which at one time they believed to lie in the past, but which for some centuries had been supposed to glimmer in the future. They must never forget that hope. But the golden age seemed nearer in 1850 than it does now."