SOURCES OF SOUTHERN WEALTH.
By Austin P. Foster.
In the undeveloped resources of the South lie dormant the possibilities of fortune that “far surpass the wealth of Ormus or of Ind.” For more than two centuries the incomparable climate and soil of this section have commanded the admiration of the world; and during this period fortunes were amassed purely by agriculture, mainly in the last century by cotton, and were handed down from father to son, until the corner stone of the industrial system was wrenched loose by a fratricidal war, and anarchy for a time supervened. As Henry Watterson pithily puts it: “The whole story of the South may be summed up in a sentence: She was rich, and she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free, and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than ever before.”
Yet what a change from the happy years of ante-bellum prosperity, when the South was by far the wealthiest section of the country, to the desolation, the poverty and the criminal oppression of reconstruction times! After four years of the most sanguinary strife in the history of the world the Southern soldier took up the battle of existence and of maintenance and of rehabilitation. Let Henry W. Grady tell the situation:
“What does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barn empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions gone; without money, credit, employment, material training; and besides all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence—the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves.
“What does he do—this hero in gray with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plow, and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June; women reared in luxury cut up their dresses and made breeches for their husbands, and, with a patience and heroism that fit women always as a garment, gave their hands to work.”
None but people whose civilization has never had its equal in chivalric power and grace, whose ability of mind and strength of heart were derived from the purest Anglo-Saxon blood, could have restored their fortune and excelled the material welfare of its past as have the people of the South within the short expanse of forty years.
In its struggles for advancement the South has known, and still knows, two problems:
First, its duty to an inferior, dependent race; and second, its duty to industrial development.
In its conscious and its unconscious evolution and in its conscious and its unconscious solutions of these problems the South has been favored by certain material and climatic advantages:
It possesses by nature the fairest and richest domain on the face of the earth. Here we find a vast stock of the materials proper for the art and ingenuity of man to work upon; treasures of immense worth, concealed from the ignorant aboriginal red man, unknown or neglected by the planter, and utilized only within the last thirty years. Now the rocks are disclosing their hidden gems; huge mountains of iron and coal and limestone, of lead and zinc and marble and phosphate, are pouring forth vast stores; and more than one-half the timber wealth of the entire country is found within the Southern states conserved in virgin forests and reserved for the present and for the coming generations. The South produces two-thirds of the cotton of the world. The water power is enormous and perennial, and the commercial situation relative to the world is unequalled. Of the four essentials to all industries, therefore, iron, wood, cotton and motive power, the South is abundantly blessed. Add to these a perfect climate and a fertile soil which yields every product of the temperate zone, and who shall deny to the South the primacy in the years to come?
The remarkable results effected in the South since the war between the States have been attained principally in the last twenty-five years. Statistics, which are often dry and uninteresting, in this case prove the argument most conclusively.
The wages paid to factory hands in the South, which in 1880 were $75,900,000, had risen to $249,413,150 in 1900, and are now $350,000,000 annually.
The capital invested in manufacturing in the South in 1880 was $257,000,000; in 1900, $1,153,002,368, and now $1,500,000,000, annually, and rapidly increasing.
The value of its manufactured products in 1880 was $457,400,000; in 1900, $1,463,643,177, and now $2,000,000,000.
In the last twenty-five years the increases of other important products were:
Pig iron from 397,000 tons to 3,000,000 tons.
Coal from 6,000,000 tons to 45,000,000 tons.
Phosphate (since 1890), from 750,000 tons to 3,000,000 tons.
Railroad mileage, from 20,600 miles to 55,000 miles.
Cotton, from 5,757,397 bales to 12,162,000 bales.
The grain crop (corn, wheat, oats and rye), from 431,000,000 bushels to 791,000,000 bushels.
These facts are impressive, convincing and full of hope for the future.
The value of the staple crops—corn, wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, rye and hay—in 1904 was $542,121,000; the value of the other farm crops was $550,000,000; and the value of the cotton not less than $515,000,000, besides the cotton seed, amounting to $50,000,000 more. All this amounts to an aggregate sum of $3,657,121,000, earned annually by the South from the sources indicated, not including the lumber and other raw material, which, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, leave the South annually for all the parts of the habitable globe.
No wonder the South is prosperous! And an indubitable proof of its prosperity lies in its increase in the assessed valuation of its property. This increase since 1900 amounts to $1,000,000,000 for the fourteen states of the South. This is partly due to raised assessments, partly to increased prices for its products, but mainly to an increase of customary products and to new products. The increase in the wealth of the South, however, has been steady for the last twenty years, and in that time has aggregated more than $2,300,000,000.
What now is the magic spell which has wrought this abundant prosperity, the sesame by the pronouncing of which is opened the secret hiding place of Southern wealth? Diversification is the word—diversification of crops and diversification of manufacturing and diversification of all industries. Cotton, though a puissant monarch, seated upon a throne, from which for reasons of perfect adaptability of soil and climate he can never be deposed, is not the only king who conducts a beneficent sway for the complex needs of an enterprising people.
The forest king rears his august head and stretches out his hands cornucopia-like from the Potomac to the Rio Grande and from the Gulf to the Ohio, inviting capital and effort to his virgin domains, which, if properly protected, will in the future be a source of perpetual and inestimable wealth; and which even now furnish to the South approximately $400,000,000 per annum.
Phosphate is another king whose sway within his narrow domain is as absolute as is that of cotton. The United States furnishes more than half the phosphate rock of the world, and of this the South supplies all but an inconsiderable quantity. This product, of vast consequences to the agriculture of this section, is a comparatively recent discovery. The active development of phosphate mining commenced in South Carolina in 1868; it was greatly stimulated by the discovery of large deposits in Florida in 1888, and has been attaining greater and ever greater proportions since the exploitation of the immense bodies of rich rock in Middle Tennessee.
And of like importance to cotton and phosphate is that modern industrial triumvirate, coal, iron ore and limestone. These essential elements in the production of pig iron are found in close juxtaposition in thousands of localities from Birmingham, Ala., to West Virginia. In the latter named state are twenty thousand square miles of coal; in Tennessee five thousand; in Alabama still more, besides the smaller fields of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas.
A few years ago Henry Watterson was criticised as visionary for his assertion that pig iron, which was then selling at Pittsburg at $20 to $25 per ton, could be profitably produced in the South at $10 per ton. Yet it has been sold on the market at Birmingham and other points at $7 per ton. This is rendered possible by the fact that two tons of iron ore, two tons of coal and one ton of limestone can be bought in the ground for an average of twenty cents a ton, or $1.00 for the whole. And the consequence is that Southern iron is offered in the English markets and on the Continent of Europe in competition with the whole world.
Besides the elements of wealth of prime importance, which have heretofore been mentioned, there are many others, the aggregate of which contributes materially to the riches of the South, such as cotton-seed, tobacco, rice, leather, fruits, vegetables, cattle, wool, fine horses and other live stock. But when all is said it is manufacturing which produces most wealth; it is manufacturing which the South most needs, and it is manufacturing which offers in the South a most attractive avenue for investment. Textiles should accompany and follow the production of cotton and wool. Steel should be made from pig iron and machinery from both. Fertilizers should be manufactured in close proximity to the phosphate rock; and furniture and fine finishing in contiguity to the forests.
In all these directions the South has done and is doing much. Twenty-five years ago Judge Kelley of Pennsylvania, “Pig Iron” Kelley, predicted the coming power of the South in industrial pursuits, and said, “The development of the South means the enrichment of the nation.” What though a cotton mill remove from New England to that region of the South which produces the staple; what though a furniture factory from Michigan seek the incomparable forests of the South, or a boot and shoe factory from any other section depart to the localities abounding in hides and tanning bark; their places will be taken by other industries, conducted by other men with new capital.
And the South has another source of wealth which has hitherto been unsuspected, one which means additional annual income by the hundreds of millions of dollars; one which represents a new industry in the economy of the world, and a new source of supply for an ever-increasing demand. It is the production of sugar from the stalk of the common maize or Indian corn. The inherent interest in such a surprising announcement and the far-reaching effects of the industry primarily upon the fortunes and the commerce of the South and secondarily upon those of the world, warrant, if they do not demand, a brief account of a discovery which means a new departure in several different directions:
Several years ago Prof. F. L. Stewart, the eminent scientist of Murrysville, Pa., discovered that, if the immature ears of corn be removed at nearly the roasting ear period, a physiological change then takes place in the plant. Its life is greatly prolonged and the vigor which was previously expended toward the maturing of the grain is thereafter directed toward the production of sugar, as certainly, as uniformly, and to as great an extent as is the case of the ripening sugar cane. As a consequence from twelve to fifteen per cent of sugar is then contained in the stalk, instead of the five or six per cent which it ordinarily possesses; and the yield is from 140 to 200 pounds of sugar to the ton, while each acre will produce from twelve to seventeen tons of trimmed stalks. And the cost of the production of sugar by the Stewart processes is only one and a half cents per pound, as against two and one-fourth cents from sugar cane and three cents from sugar beets.
And this is not all; the by-products are as valuable as the sugar. These are paper pulp, cellulose, fine charcoal, stock feed and preparations of value in the arts and sciences.
Here is food for thought indeed! How its application to the South enlarges, for it is the South which is destined to be the main beneficiary of this astounding discovery. Sugar cane cannot be grown successfully farther north than thirty degrees of latitude; the sugar beet cannot be grown successfully farther south than forty degrees of latitude. This leaves a broad strip of ten degrees of latitude, mainly in the South, in which sugar from cornstalks can be and will be produced in enormous quantities. The North cannot share in the profits of this industry, because its season is too short for the maturing of the sugar in the juice.
The effect of this industry will be a revolution in the raising of corn in the Southern states.
And what of the future of the South in its dealings with the countries of Central America and of South America? But a few miles of railroad are now needed to unite the two American continents, and but a few miles of canal will cleave them in twain—union and disunion in commercial harmony. Then will the South come into its own in the advantages of foreign commerce which will not be restricted to its trade with the western hemisphere. The Eastern and the Southern nations need everything that we produce. We need nearly everything that they produce, and in the ensuing reciprocity of the new order of things many indirections of the present laws of commerce shall be straightened.
And yet—shall it be said?—there are those who fear that, in the hurrying strife for wealth, the sterling qualities which characterized the old regime may become atrophied, if not entirely lost. Such fears are futile and unfounded. The present generation is not so immersed in its progress that it is unmindful of the patriotism and example of its forbears; it knows that the hope of the nation in former times rested in the South; that its leaders were the bearers of the ark of the covenant and the puissant directors of the policies of an entire country; to them and to their history, biography and traditions do the present leaders turn for inspiration toward the best achievement. And while industrial conditions have changed, the South needs her sons to-day as much as when she summoned them to the forum to maintain her political supremacy and when she called them to the field to maintain her honor. And they will never fail her.
SOCIETY OF THE FOREST.
(A STORY FOR CHILDREN.)
By M. W. Connolly.