True to her past, the South is not living in it. A wonderful future is before her. She is richer than was the whole United States at the beginning of the War of Secession; in a quarter of a century her cotton production has doubled, her manufactures quadrupled. In one decade, her farm property increased in value twenty-six per cent, her manufacturing output forty-seven; her farm products nearly one hundred. Her railroad and banking interests give as strong indications of her vigorous new life. Immigrants from East and West and North and over seas are seeking homes within her borders. The South is no decadent land, but a land where “the trees are hung with gold,” a land of new orchards and vineyards and market-gardens; of luscious berries and melons; of wheat and corn and tobacco and much cattle and poultry; of tea-gardens; and rice and sugar plantations and of fields white with cotton for the clothing of the nations. She is the land of balm and bloom, of bird-songs, of the warm hand and the open door.
I prefaced this book with words uttered by Jefferson Davis; I close with words uttered by Theodore Roosevelt, in Richmond, which read like their fulfilment:
“Great though the meed of praise which is due the South for the soldierly valor her sons displayed during the four years of war, I think that even greater praise is due for what her people have accomplished in the forty years of peace which have followed.... For forty years the South has made not merely a courageous but at times a desperate struggle. Now, the teeming riches of mines and fields and factory attest the prosperity of those who are all the stronger because of the trials and struggles through which this prosperity has come. You stand loyally to your traditions and memories; you stand also loyally for our great common country of today and for our common flag.”
The End.