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.