360 Improvement of communications. [i 810-25 there of State constitutions of an extreme democratic type. Property qualifications for the franchise, so prevalent in the East, were not required; and manhood suffrage was introduced. The power of the governor was increased ; the power of the legislature was curtailed. Some of the new States abolished life- term offices; some prohibited imprisonment for debt; others provided that the estates of suicides should be divided among the heirs, as in cases of natural death ; others made truth a good defence in suits for libel ; others made population the basis of representation. In all these new States the rights of man as man were recognised ; and the old distinctions in the East arising from the ownership of property were generally disregarded. A third result of the rapid growth of the West was the rise into national importance of the question of internal improvements made at Federal expense. The West was now a great country by itself. Along the banks of its magnificent rivers and the shores of the Great Lakes dwelt more than a million of hardy, enterprising, and progressive people. Down these rivers the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Missouri, the Mississippi were floated, on raft and flat-boat to New Orleans, pork and lumber, flour, grain, hemp, furs from the North- West, lead from Missouri, cotton, sugar, tobacco, and provisions of every sort. Before the days of steam, navigation up the rapid and winding Mississippi from New Orleans was all but impossible. The flat-boats, barges, rafts, and " broad-horns" were therefore sold for cash with their contents; and the money was brought back to Pittsburg or Wheeling, there to be expended in the purchase of the manufactures of Europe or the eastern States. But now a score of steamboats, laden with the manufactures of the Old World obtained at New Orleans, ascended the Mississippi and the Ohio to St Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Pittsburg. Com- mercially the West was no longer dependent on the eastern seaboard States ; and the western trade of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore was seriously threatened. If this great trade was to be maintained, cheap communication must be had between the seaboard and the West. With this object, appeals were made to Congress for aid ; and in 1817 a fund, consisting of the $1,500,000 to be paid by the National Bank as a bonus for its charter, and the dividends to be paid on the $7,000,000 of its stock owned by the United States, was set apart for the building of good roads and canals and the improvement of river navigation, and was to be distributed annually among the States on the basis of repre- sentation in Congress. But Madison, in the last hours of his term of office, vetoed the bill on constitutional grounds ; and the attempt to pass it over the presidential veto failed. The work of opening cheap communication with the West was, however, merely delayed, not prevented. New York at once began the digging of the Erie Canal, and finished it in 1825, thus joining the waters of Lake Erie with those of the Hudson river. Pennsylvania
