policy. It was a period of planting and development, and the thought uppermost in the minds of all was to encourage in every possible way every enterprise promoting industrial expansion and the enrichment of the community. The most that can fairly be said of the legislation and court decisions of the time is that, following English common law (and in a measure English statute law) and American colonial precedents, they affirmed. the power of the State over business interests, for the public welfare and the right of the States to exercise that power when need might arise.

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which had been incurred by them. Nearly all State constitutions adopted after this date contained a provision prohibiting the use of State funds or credit for internal improvements. Later on, however, when the railroad era began, several of the States made investments in railroad corporations, and counties and towns also bonded themselves to encourage the laying of rails. In several instances, Massachusetts for example, the State retained its interest in railroad property until the next century.

Arthur T. Hadley, Railroad Transportation (New York, 1885); Albert Stickney, State Control of Trade and Commerce by National or State Authority; William D. P. Bliss (ed.), Encyclo

was the substantial support which was given by nearly all the States to measures for internal improvements. Prior to 1807 the urgent demand for improved transportation between the different parts of the country was met by private enterprise backed by State aid. Between 1807 and 1838 Federal aid was given to the building of the famous Cumberland turnpike road, but thereafter Federal appropriations for such enterprises were discontinued. on the ground of unconstitutionality. State support for banks, canals, turnpike roads and other enterprises was so generous between 1787 and 1837 that the aggregate bonded indebtedness of all the States for such purposes was $170,806,187. The financial panic of 1837 put a stop to this subsidizing practice, and some of the States even repudiated the debts

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Acts and Resolves Public and Private of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (2 vols., Boston, 1883); E. B. O'Callaghan (ed.), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (11 vols., Albany, 1856-1861); W. J. Ashley, The Commercial Legislation of England and the American Colonies, 1660–1760, in Quarterly Journal of Economics (1899); William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789 (2 vols., Boston, 1890); Berthold Fernow (ed.), The Records of New Amsterdam (7 vols., New York, 1878); Philip A. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., New York, 1910), and Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., New York, 1896); The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (5 vols., Albany, 1894); W. Hill, Colonial Tariffs, in Quarterly Journal of Economics (1892); E. L. Bogart, Economic History of the United States; J. J. Lalor (ed.), Cyclopedia of Political Science, Political Economy and of the Political History of the United States (3 vols., Chicago, 1881); John Bach McMaster, History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (7 vols., New York, 1885-1910); Frank Hendrick, Railway Control by Commission (New York, 1900); James Edward LeRossignol, Monopolies Past and Present (New York, 1901); statutes of the several States.

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Internal improvements were not seriously considered during the colonial period. On general principles, the British government was opposed to anything which might tend to unite the colonies into a compact whole, caring only for measures to facilitate trade and the productiveness and profitableness of the separate colonies to the advantage of the mother country. The colonists on their part, alike for political and financial reasons, could not, by themselves, undertake extensive internal improvements. Until the Revolutionary period arrived each colony felt that it stood alone, politically dependent upon upon Great Britain, and that it was in no position to enter upon any enterprises of extraterritorial nature. On occasions they allied themselves, more particularly in the North, in military coöperation against the common enemy the French and the Indians - but beyond this their united efforts did not extend very far before the approach of the Revolution.

Corduroy roads were built in the South in the latter part of the Seventeenth century, and wagon road traffic was instituted between the Potomac River and Philadelphia in 1695. Immediately before and in the years following some systematic efforts were made toward road-building and the colonial legislatures passed road laws. In Maryland in 1739 the Monocacy road extending to Philadelphia was laid, and this was one of the first intercolonial wagon roads in America. Virginia built a State road across the Appalachian Mountains before the middle of the Eighteenth century. This was a portage path between the Potomac and Monongahela rivers and was probably little more than a blazed trail. In 1768 the Assembly of Virginia authorized a road from the upper branch of the Potomac to Fort Pitt. In 1775 Daniel Boone established a road through the Cumberland Gap which became historically famous as the great thoroughfare to Kentucky and the West.

In the first years of the Republic a freer interstate communication than had before existed was demanded by social, political and commercial considerations. During the Revolution the comparatively isolated conditions of the different sections of the country formed one of the most serious difficulties the fighting patriots had to face; and the statesmen of the following period, impressed by the common experience of 1770-1783, realized the necessity of bringing the States into closer communion and inter-dependence as a fundamental condition of solid and enduring union. These views were particularly emphasized anew in the latter part of the century by the events of the western expansion into the newly-acquired public domain, and by the separatist tendencies, which manifested themselves not only in this expansion movement, but also in the more or less conflicting commercial and industrial interests of the older sections of the country.

Communication between the different States was ther, as in the colonial days, either by long water routes in sailing vessels or by tedious landjourneys over local roads rudely built and, for the most part, non-continuous. Travel and transportation was by carts, coaches, wagons and packhorses. The trips were slow and costly. By wagon from Philadelphia to Pittsburg was a twenty days' trip. The wagons were drawn by teams of four to eight horses who could draw

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loads of four to six tons. The freight charges were $2 per hundred pounds.

Improvement in the roads was considered as soon as the Republic was finally constituted. Turnpikes or toll roads, as they had long existed in England and as they had been begun in the colonies, were planned. Charters were granted to private corporations for the building and the maintenance of these roads. The first was constructed in 1790 and others followed in good number, principally in New England, New York and Pennsylvania. Within their somewhat limited scope, they very well served the purpose for which they were designed. Transportation

and travel became easier and even cheaper, despite the high tolls. To haul goods from Philadelphia to Kentucky cost thirty-three per cent. of their value. Charges were as high as $100 a ton per mile. Adam Seybert, one of our first government statisticians, recorded it as a great triumph at this time that " you may go from Philadelphia to Pittsburg in the stage, 310 miles, in five and a half days, and be lodged every night on the route."

The success which attended the first of these roads as public conveniences and as investments stimulated a wide and strong public interest in them. For numerous reasons, communities, businessmen and statesmen encouraged their construction and it was not long before the settled part of the country everywhere was well traversed by them. Foreign commerce

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was springing up then, for Europe, involved in war, needed our agricultural products to feed its people. The problem of transporting corn, grain and other staples to the seaboard for shipment was difficult, but it was met as well as possible by the multiplication of the turnpikes. State aid was given to some of these enterprises, but for the most part they were carried out by private capital. Such was the rush to get into this business that in a few years" a sum almost equal to the domestic debt at the close of the Revolution was invested in the stock of the turnpike roads." Until 1807 private companies built all these roads mainly from Philadelphia to the West through gaps in the mountains. In 1807 the Federal government began its work upon the great Cumberland Road or National Pike from Washington to Vandalia, Illinois, but this was not completed for more than thirty years, after which the railroads were coming in to supplant it.

Internal improvements was the subject of a communication to Congress by Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin in 1808.* The Secretary presented full statements concerning the canals and turnpike roads then in existence and urged the necessity of improving them. Specifically, he recommended three great systems of internal improvements. The first was a hundred-mile canal along the At

lantic sea coast from Boston to South

*American State Papers, Miscellaneous, vol. i. (Washington, 1834).

Carolina and Georgia, crossing the narrow neck of Cape Cod and utilizing the Long Island Sound, the Raritan and the Delaware rivers, and the marshes between the Chesapeake and the Albemarle sounds. The second plan was for four roads, with several canals, for the purpose of connecting the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Kanawha, and the Genesee rivers with the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James and the Savannah rivers of the Atlantic seaboard. By the third plan it was proposed to connect the Penobscot, the Kennebec, the Connecticut, the Hudson and the Susquehanna rivers with the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes.

Before that time many interior canals, mostly short ones, had been constructed in Massachusetts, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana. The State of Virginia granted a charter for one to the James River Company in 1785, and before the Revolution Washington planned one to connect the Chesapeake and the Ohio rivers. All the local canals existing in 1808 Gallatin proposed to utilize and improve.

Turnpike roads multiplied. Some of these were merely dirt and quagmires in bad weather, others were substantially built of gravel or topped with broken stone. Between 1803 and 1808 in Connecticut alone 50 companies had built roads at a cost of from $550 to $2,280 per mile. Several roads in Massachusetts cost from $3,000 to $4,000 per mile. In New

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York within seven years 67 companies, with a capital of $5,000,000, had been organized to build roads and 21 companies to build toll bridges. were excellent roads in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, costing from $2,500 to $14,000 per mile, but south of the Potomac there were comparatively few. There were good wooden bridges in Massachusetts and many fine stone ones in Pennsylvania.

Gallatin planned to combine some of these roads into a great turnpike extending from Maine to Georgia in the general direction of the seacoast and the Maine post-road, a distance of 1,600 miles. He calculated that all the needed canal and road improvements would cost $20,000,000. It was a magIt was a magnificent project for the time. Some of it was carried out within the next few years, but much was left for future generations to accomplish. The introduction of steamboats on the rivers presently turned men's minds in that direction, and next the railroads sprang up and put an end to the consideration of turnpike roads as transportation thoroughfares.

Not until after the War of 1812 was there any very important work in canal-building. The Erie Canal, the largest, most costly and most important artificial waterway of the country, connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River, across the State of New York (a distance of 381 miles), was planned in 1810, begun in 1817, and completed in 1825. Its operation made New York the foremost port of the country for

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the exporting of the products of the West sent across the Great Lakes and down the canal and the Hudson River. Other important canals of the next half-century, the years of their completion, and their length were: the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (Pennsylvania), 1821, 108 miles; the Schuylkill Navigation Company (Pennsylvania), 1826, 108 miles; the Miami and Erie (Ohio), 1835, 274 miles; the Ohio, 1835, 317 miles; the Morris and Essex (New Jersey), 1836, 103 miles; the Pennsylvania, 1839, 193 miles; the Illinois and Michigan, 1848, 102 miles; the Chesapeake and Ohio, 1850, 184 miles. Prior to 1860 the principal canals of the United States, beginning with the Dismal Swamp of 1822, were 28 in number, their total length being 2,359 miles and the aggregate cost of construction over $155,000,000. On some of these additional amounts were spent in subsequent years, while some, on the other hand, were discontinued.

The indebtedness of many States had its origin in internal improvements. In 1820 the gross amount of State indebtedness was $12,790,728; in 1830, $26,470,417; in 1835, $66,482,186; in 1838, $170,000,000; and in 1840, $200,000,000. Broadly speaking, somewhat less than one-third of this indebtedness was incurred in the State support of banks; the rest went mostly for canals, roads, and railways. Of the indebtedness of 1838, $52,000,000 was for banks, $60,000,000 for canals, $43,000,000 for railways, $6,000,000