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Just so will it be in our holy cities
of the future--the garden will be right there "in the midst."



CHAPTER II
PRESENT CONDITIONS


Up to the Civil War and for some years after, our people were almost
wholly agricultural. National activity contented itself with
settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose
virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men.
The policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation
of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the
mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady
stream into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.
A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, based upon
cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to
cotton. In the North, New England had developed some few centers of
industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great
Southern staple. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as
outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished
but feebly and in few localities.


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