The Indians and buffaloes were being driven back.
There was a line of railway from ocean to ocean.

The population was gaining at the rate of a million a year.

Colorado had just been baptized as a new State.

And it was still an unsolved problem whether or not the United States could be kept united, whether or not it could be built into an organic nation without losing the spirit of self-help and democracy.
It is not easy for us to realize to-day how young and primitive was the United States of 1876.

Yet the fact is that we have twice the population that we had when the telephone was invented.