A History Of The American Nation

PREFACE American history has been making at a very rapid rate in these early years of the twentieth century events of importance have followed one another in quick succession new views of social duty and new ideas concerning obligations in industrial relationships have come so quickly that it has been hard to keep pace with new conditions or to appreciate the principles of action. All of these developments have in some degree changed our attitude toward the past. The writer of history, if true to his faith and loyal to hi science, will not allow his statements of fact and of social change to be colored or distorted by his hopes for the future or by his judgments of the present it is his duty to tell his story entertainingly if he can but as calmly and truthfully as the facts and his grasp of them permit. And yet we are always getting new points of view, new angles of vision, new turning points in the onward road, from which to look back upon the past and things which loomed large at one time or to one generation of history students are reduced to smaller dimensions and, on the other hand, things that once seemed small and comparatively unimportant appear large and full of meaning when judged by later experience. As the present is the product of infinite factors working in the past, we must ever get, as we go on and as life changes about us, new glimpses of forces that have made us what we are. The main events of American history cannot be changed, and must be learned, as far as we Can now see, by successive genera tions of boys and girls the planting of the English colonies on the edge of the new continent and their development in political capacity and self-sufficiency the estrangementfrom the mother country the war and independence the formation of the federal vi HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN NATION Union the expansion of the republic till it reached across the continent and beyond the ideals of democratic government influenced by the experiences of the frontier . the growth of slavery and of anti-slavery sentiment the gradual separation of the sections until the South sought to sever the bonds of union the declaration of the Civil War that there must be one nation, and that, as a house divided against itself will surely fall and a nation cannot exist half slave and half free, the nation should be wholly free the gradual reconstruction, economic and political, after the struggle between the sections. But there are other things, too, and these to-day mean more to us than they did only a few year ago the development of party machinery, the tasks of democratic government in a changing social order, the using and sometimes the mis-using of the natural re sources of the country, the growth of cities and the multiplying of factories in fact, the new conditions which are the product of the manufacturing regime and which have brought their demands for legislation and political action. Every passing year seems to add significance to the important general phases of industrial growth during the last fifty years, while the rela tions of government to industry and to tasks of social better ment are more and more the subject for discussion. This does not mean that history should be written from the point of view of industrial growth alone on the contrary, perhaps never before was there such need for understanding political history and knowing the development or change of politicalprinciples, and for this reason, because political society, the state, the government, and law are now closely involved in every problem of industrial control, in every plan for general social regenera tion. With some such ideas as this in mind, the present edition of this book has been prepared...