Within the last ten years impudence has invented a new means of expression: "Thanking you in advance." These words are attached to every kind of request. At first they appeared only in circulars of second-rate business houses that were seeking your custom; but now even bishops and college presidents use them. Where they came from I can't imagine. The French gave us the tiresome "It goes without saying," and the English, I suppose, are to blame for "It is a far cry;" can it be that "Thanking you in advance" is of native origin? Then, blush, America, - if you can.

The phrase, as it is used, is objectionable for two reasons. First, it assumes that you will certainly do the thing asked for. Second, it declares that the petitioner does not want to bother with writing you a letter of thanks in return for your service. Is not that discourteous and outrageous?

What are we coming to? Pretty soon we shall all be using it, and the mails will be filled with such letters as these:

To his Excellency Governor Higgins. DEAR SIR, I have been in prison

ADORABLE MATILDA, I, who have long loved you, but could never voice my passion, now take my pen in hand to throw myself at your feet and beg you to be mine. Thanking you in advance for your favorable reply, I am Your deeply smitten

AUGUSTUS.

fixed in their memories. Charles the First and Mary Stuart on their scaffolds, the barons and the king at Runnymede, Maria Theresa appealing to the nobles of Hungary to take up their swords for her child, Marie Antoinette and Mirabeau, and many another pageant of human love and sacrifice, are treasured up by other peoples as we have treasured up this crude, unlackeyed martyrdom. Even the great personality of Lincoln, now potent in so many individual lives, intimate and familiar of so many of our hidden moods, was not yet fully revealed to his fellows. It was the emancipator only that had fallen; the leader and shepherd of men. Outwardly, at least, his experience was limited as theirs was. Dying in the midst of multitudes, master of armies and of vies, he was still of the frontier; as, indeed, all our American life was still, in a sense, only the frontier and western fringe of European life. True, Lincoln also leads our thoughts back to the princes whose peer he was; but we can pass from his deathbed with no irreverence, no sense of shock or change, to look out, in the plain light of day, upon the whole wide field of work and strife and progress which was always in his thought, and glimpse the attitude and state of the republic when his summons passed, like an angelus, across the continent.

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The continent still set bounds to the growth and aspiration of the Republic. Nor were the continental limits in any sense filled out and occupied. There were neither dependencies nor colonies, but only the states, the territories, and the District of Columbia. From the Atlantic to the Mississippi, leaving out, for the moment, the region of undetermined status where the armies were still at work, all was permanently divided into states. One of these, the oldest, had been shorn in twain, its eastern lowlands, which held with the South, keeping the old and famous name, while its western, mountainous parts were irregularly erected into the new, amorphous state of West Virginia.

Beyond the Mississippi, a column of five states, Louisiana, the eldest, at the bottom, Minnesota at the top, bordered the river and the plains. Kansas, midway up the column, and Texas, at its base, stretched out farther still into the waste. Thence to the Rocky Mountains were territories only.

Three of these, Utah, Nebraska, and Colorado, were already demanding statehood. Nebraska, whose population of 50,000 was for the most part agricultural, and might, therefore, be considered as fixed upon her soil, had perhaps the best claim of the three; but there also the restless, migratory impulse continued to appear. Colorado, suddenly invaded by a throng of seekers after gold and silver, the true extent of her mines not yet completely known, could make no guarantee of a sufficient permanent population. These two territories, moreover, had had too little forethought of the trend of public opinion concerning the negro to make, in the constitutions they were framing, such a place for the black man among their citizens as a growing sentiment in the older Northern states was even now beginning to demand for him. Utah's population was, in fact, the greatest of all; and it was also the most compact and homogeneous. Her settlers were already accumulating wealth and building a city by the Great Salt Lake. They were proving that the desert could be made to blossom; the ditches they were digging with their hands were the beginning of the work of irrigation which has redeemed from absolute waste a region greater than New York. But they were also building a temple, now one of the most curious and impressive places of worship in the world; and because of the temple and what it stood for, this industrious and thriving community was under a ban. The Mormons had journeyed to Utah in 1846 from their temporary home in Nauvoo, in Illinois, and now controlled the territory politically and industrially. The Latter Day Saints had entered in where it was by war determined that the slave-holder

should never come; but even Douglas, the champion of "squatter sovereignty," had been unwilling to concede to the Mormons the privileges of self-government. He had proposed in 1857 to strike Utah out of the list of territories. But the only national law concerning Mormonism was the act of 1862, which merely forbade polygamy in the territories, fixed the punishment for the offense at a fine of five thousand dollars, and limited to fifty thousand dollars the amount of real estate which any religious or charitable association might hold. That act was never enforced with any thoroughness. Polygamy continued to be practiced, and Utah had no good prospect of statehood.

In the more southern of the territories, population was sparse; the Indians, the Mexicans, and the people of mixed blood, still far outnumbered the settlers from the states. New Mexico and Arizona had together less than 50,000 white inhabitants, no cities, no important industries, and no hope of immediate statehood. To the northward were the territories of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Dakota, roamed over by Indians and a few white men. Their mines, their forests, and the fields which are now so productive of wheat and corn, were scarcely touched.

The number of Indians in the whole country was estimated at a little over 300,000; and the great majority had their homes beyond the Mississippi. The principal eastern tribes were gathered together in the Indian Territory. Several of these, having among them a considerable number of negro slaves, had at the outbreak of the war openly espoused the Southern cause. The Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles had been represented by delegates in the Confederate congress at Richmond. But before the end of the struggle they were all brought back into that ill-defined allegiance to the Union which they had formerly acknowledged. Apart from this, the largest grouping of Indians anywhere in the country, the more important agencies were the Central, in Missouri, the two

Chippewa agencies, on the Mississippi and on Lake Superior, and the Mackinac and the Northern, both in the far Northwest. There were 50,000 Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, half as many in Dakota, more than 50,000 in California. Besides the income from a trust fund of three million dollars, the government appropriated annually nearly a million to maintain the agencies. The personnel of the agencies, however, was as bad as could be found in any branch of our civil service, and our troubles over the Indians were sure to grow acute again before any better system should be tried. The policy of massing them in reservations was still the approved method of keeping them in order.

No railroad or other highway crossed the vast region between the valley of the Mississippi and the crest of the Rockies. It was the time of the "pony express.' The principal pony express route was very nearly identical with the present route of the Union and Central Pacific railroads across Nebraska, upper Utah. Nevada, and California, to San Francisco. The Santa Fé route, starting from Independence, Missouri, crossed the Indian Territory into New Mexico, but stopped at Santa Fé. The Oregon route diverged northwestward from the central pony express route near Salt Lake. A mail route close to the Mexican line turned northward when it reached California, and ended at San Francisco.

But beyond this region, our true "West" and frontier, there was a still farther West of better realized opportunity. Two states, California and Oregon, looked out upon the Pacific. Political considerations had also induced Congress, in 1864, to grant the powers of statehood to the miners of Nevada, although, as the event proved, they had not so good a case as their fellows of Colorado. The three Pacific states had perhaps 600,000 people, and 223 miles of railroad. Both in California and in Oregon there were natural resources sufficient for large populations. This was true, also,

of the region north of Oregon, whose limits were not yet quite completely defined, because it was not yet finally determined whether the boundary line agreed upon in the treaty of 1846 should run to the north or to the south of certain small islands off the coast of Washington Territory. That was the only serious boundary dispute between the United States and any of their neighbors.

Here, then, in that larger half of the Republic which stretched out beyond the Mississippi, was the ample field awaiting the next great display of national energy; and already men of wealth and enterprise were taking the first step toward a real occupation. Already, two companies were formed to cross with railroads the deserts which divided the Pacific states from the states of the Mississippi Valley. The two lines were soon stretching out blindly in opposite directions, feeling their way, as it were, to some point where they might meet and join. That, in fact, is not a very inaccurate description of the status of the two enterprises. In 1864, after various tentative and ineffective measures, Congress had held out such generous inducements that capitalists were found willing to take up the scheme of a transcontinental line, and the Union Pacific Company was chartered and organized. The Central Pacific, chartered under the laws of California, was an independent company. Neither road was bound to follow the other's choice of a route, but they were bound to make a junction. As yet, however, the territories, ten in all, including the Indian Territory, were without railroads and telegraph lines. In all their immense area there were less than 300,000 people. Millions of square miles, still inaccessible to agriculture, trade, and manufactures, were waiting until the energy so long absorbed in strife between the North and the South should be set to bridging the vast chasm of desert and mountains between the Pacific and the Mississippi. The earlier westward movement had been twofold. Two streams of population, moving along

parallel lines, one below the lakes, the other above the gulf, had carried toward the Pacific the two kindred but diverging civilizations which were now embattled. Until those two columns, at last united, should march one way, the West must wait.

But even before that release could come, the energy of the older group of Eastern states was not completely absorbed in the struggle with the South. The history of the United States during the four years of civil war is far from being a history of warfare only. Interrupted, diminished for a time, and forced into new channels, the industry of the North had never ceased to be effective. Even in the early, gloomy period of the struggle, it was actually, in some fields, pressing forward.

Foreign commerce was, of course, lessened, for there was no Northern staple to take the place of cotton. The total value of our exports fell from 243 million dollars in the fiscal year 1861 to 194 millions in 1865; our imports of all commodities, which in 1861 were 286 millions, were in 1865 but 234 millions. The decline of our merchant marine had been still more rapid, for within a few months of the outbreak of hostilities there were Confederate privateers waiting to waylay our merchantmen at those "crossroads of the seas" which the genius of Commodore Maury had charted out. The tonnage of American vessels employed in foreign commerce had fallen sixty per cent in five years: : that is to say, from more than two and one-half million tons in 1860 to but little more than one million tons in 1865. Our domestic commerce, which far exceeded in volume all our trade with foreign countries, was also lessened, possibly in even greater proportion. Southern cotton no longer made its way to New England. The wharves of Boston, the mills of Lawrence and Lowell and Fall River, would not now have persuaded a Southern planter, as they had once persuaded Yancey, that cotton was the basis of the entire wealth of the East.