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1857-eo] Financial depression. 433 when lawless men were planning and organising armed expeditions for the conquest of still more slave territory in Central America. Bu- chanan's election to the Presidency meant the ascendancy, at least for a time, of the party which, frankly enough, supported the southern interest. The four years of his term of office (March 4, 1857, to March 4, 1861) afforded space enough in which to fight the battle of parties to a finish. For a little while the anxiety of the country was diverted from politics to business. The year 1857 was a year of very serious commercial depression, paying the penalty for years of confident and adventurous speculation. For ten years, since 1846, the country had felt the exhilaration and excitement of a rapid business expansion, which the discovery of gold in California had greatly quickened. Capital had run confidingly to new enterprises; loans had been easy to get; railroads and steamships had opened the channels of commerce, old and new, wider than ever before, both at home and abroad, and had greatly multiplied its routes in every direction; an era of invention had ac- companied and occasioned unprecedented advances in the mechanic arts, affecting both agriculture and manufactures. Under the unwonted stimulus, sound business methods had not unnaturally given place to reckless speculation. Money was quickly enough invested, but was very slow to yield an increase. Enterprise after enterprise proved a dead loss. The banks of the country afforded no currency that could com- mand confidence. Each State chartered banks of issue, and made its own laws, good, bad, and indifferent, for giving credit to their notes. There was no national regulation or oversight ; no one could know which issues were safe, which unsafe. Enterprise was paid for in promises to pay, until of a sudden there came a day of reckoning : the inevitable contraction of loans ; a season of failures and disillusionment ; hard fact in the place of hope; painful disclosures of wholesale dishonesty, of defalcations and systematic fraud. The entire fabric of business came down with a crash, and panic had a long and doleful reign. The population of the country had kept to its steady rate of increase from decade to decade as if unaffected by politics, every ten years showing an increase of from thirty-two to thirty-five per cent. The decade 1850-60 was no exception. The numbers of the census rose by more than eight millions. But it was impossible that population should follow industry as fast as it was being pushed between 1846 and 1857. Rail- roads were built where there were neither farms nor towns to support them ; sometimes upon open reaches of the continent, which the plough had never touched. The federal government had helped trade forward as it could. In 1850, while the great migration to the gold-fields of California was in full stream, it had seemed certain that an inter-oceanic canal would be cut through the Isthmus of Panama, and a most en- lightened and satisfactory treaty with regard to its political oversight, its neutrality and disinterested management for the use of the world, C. M. H. VII CH. XIII.