Our earlier immigrants sought homes for the most part on western farms. Those of recent years settle mainly in manufacturing centers.

726. When the Civil War began, the thirty-four States made a solid block from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, with one

ELLIS ISLAND, IN NEW YORK HARBOR, where our annual million immigrants are detained for examination.

complete tier on the west bank of that river and with Texas and California farther west. Kansas was added in 1861; Nevada, in '64; Nebraska, in '67; and Colorado became the thirty-eighth State in 1876.

No new State came in for the next thirteen years - although the increase of population was then still most rapid in the agricultural region of the newest "West." In the Dakotas, districts without a settler in March were sometimes organized counties in November. The two Dakota Territories were long kept knocking for admission, however, because the Democratic Congress was unwilling to add States so sure to reinforce the

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THE NEW STATES

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Republican party. Montana and Washington, on the other hand, were expected to strengthen the Democrats; and in 1889 an "omnibus bill" admitted all four States. The next year, the admission of Idaho and Wyoming gave the first continuous band of States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Utah, though prosperous and populous, was kept out for years because of its

FUTURE AMERICANS. A photograph of a band of Armenians landed at Ellis Island, March 9, 1916. The advance guard of a body of 4200 who were rescued at one time from Turkish massacre by a French cruiser off the coast of Syria.

polygamy; but in 1890, when the Mormon Church renounced that doctrine, the State was admitted. Oklahoma, the old "Indian Territory," came in in 1907, and Arizona and New Mexico in 1912. This completed the solid block of forty-eight States in the vast region bounded by the two oceans, east and west, and by Canada and Mexico north and south. Before long, no doubt, the nation will be confronted with demands

for statehood from distant possessions, Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico.

727. After 1880, the "New South" began to reap its share of industrial growth. First it seized upon its long-neglected advantages for cotton manufacture. Northern capital built mills along the "Fall Line" (§ 180), and cheap labor was found by inducing the "Poor Whites" of the neighboring mountain-folk to gather in factory villages, where the indolent

COTTON LEVEE AT NEW ORLEANS. From a photograph.

parents might live on the earnings of little children. The awakened South began also to make use of its mines and forests, especially of the rich coal and iron region stretching from West Virginia through Tennessee into Northern Alabama. By 1880, Alabama was sending pig iron to Northern mills, and soon she became herself a great center of steel manufacturing. Thus the old agricultural South was transformed into a new South of varied industries. And even its agriculture has