NEW INDUSTRIES AND SIGNIFICANT FEATURES OF A NEW LIFE IN THE SOUTH.
It is a good indication of the movement of the South to manufacture its own staples, that since 1866 it has set in motion 600,000 spindles, of which Georgia has 213,157, a third of them being in Columbus, and that the cotton mills at Augusta, Ga., alone turned out $4,000,000 worth of manufactured products last year, paid ten to twelve per cent. dividends, and carried a handsome surplus to the sinking-fund accounts.
The president of the large mills at Nashville, Tenn., assured us that his mills in 1878–9 had earned fifteen per cent. dividends. One of our wealthiest manufacturers of New England, who has recently been to Eastern Tennessee, where he has an interest in a new mill, says if twenty years younger, he would certainly go South and invest largely in manufacturing. Everything is favorable for such enterprise.
This is in striking contrast with the time when the papers, voicing the sentiment of Virginia, compelled the founders of Lowell, Mass., to abandon their purpose of building their mills in Richmond, because such industries were in deadly hostility to Southern institutions.
Another significant, but almost unnoted feature of the new South, (for the old is passing away more rapidly than is generally believed,) is the increasing favor with which the town system, but more especially the common-school system, is regarded by the people.
Under the old régime both were unknown. Virginia (and we believe she was in harmony in this with all the other slave States) pauperized the pupil who received aid, by making the overseer of the poor the disburser of such funds as were appropriated by the County Court for educational purposes.
The business, which in New England is transacted by the citizens of a town, assembled in town meeting, duly warned, and notified of the business that could be brought before it, was, in the South, transacted by the County Court for a whole county. Surprise is often expressed that the people of the South can be led, in almost solid masses, to the polls, to vote for men and measures which those who know the private sentiments of the people are sure they do not approve.
But conceive of New England as having never sent her children to a common school; as having never gathered in town meeting; as having never known even a Congregational Church meeting, and, at the same time, as having free thought on all questions of public policy overshadowed, fettered and ruthlessly throttled by an interest which enthroned itself as supreme in commercial, political and social life, before which good society did homage, and politicians sacrificed, and divines worshipped, without whose approval nothing was right, and without whose protection nothing was safe. Conceive what, under such circumstances, New England would have been, and then cease to wonder that the pro-slavery disunionist was not crushed, and that the Bourbon politician is not buried under the new sentiment which lives in the South to-day.
But it is manifest to anyone who knew the South under the old state of things, and who has had opportunity of seeing it to-day, that these two agencies which have made New England what she is, but were unknown to the South—which were thrust upon her as a part of the reconstructive machinery, against her sullen but helpless protest, and were hated accordingly—are coming more and more into favor with the people.
It is noteworthy and significant that the Legislature of Tennessee, last year, in all its frantic, unwise, and dishonest efforts to reduce expenses, did not reduce her school appropriations. He must be a blind observer and a dull reasoner who does not see that this is most significant as showing that old things are passing away, and all things are becoming new in a regenerated South.