“Then the result of all this will not be an immense and immediate increase in the whole output of cotton?”
“Not immediate, no; but who can tell what the ultimate result may be? It is quite possible, for instance, that a cheaper and more effective method of combating the boll-weevil may one day be discovered. As it is, with all our care in breaking up the hibernating places of the pest, and planting so that the greater part of the crop can be secured before he is ready to attack it, we merely keep him effectively in check, we do not exterminate him. He still puts us to much additional labour and expense, and he still gets the end of the crop.”
“He seems to have been a valuable stimulus to effort, however; you ought not to speak ungratefully of him.”
“His work in that respect is done—we have no further use for him. By-the-by, have you seen his portrait?”
And I left Mr. Knapp with my note-book enriched with a counterfeit presentment, many times enlarged, of the insect which has co-operated with Mr. John D. Rockefeller in the agricultural regeneration of the South.
[24]. “Mr. Richard H. Edmonds, in an illuminating article in the Review of Reviews for February, 1906, has declared that no country ever dominated, as does the South, an industry of such value and importance as the cotton crop.... Three-fourths of this great crop, which must be relied on to clothe civilization, and in the exploitation of which two billions of capital are used, is raised in the South. It is a stupendous God-made monopoly. To-day, the South has invested, in 777 mills, with their 9,200,000 spindles, $225,000,000, as against $21,000,000 twenty-five years ago. The fields of the South furnish the raw material for three-fourths of the mills of all the world with their 110,000,000 spindles. The South now consumes 2,300,000 bales, which is about the amount consumed by the rest of the country, and is a fourfold increase over its consumption in 1890.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 18. A threefold increase in the cotton-crops seems easily possible; but whether prices could be kept up under such conditions is another question. Be this as it may, an immense agricultural development seems practically certain.
[25]. “The figures of our national census show that from 1860 to 1870 there was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the assessed value of Southern property, and that the period of Reconstruction added, in the years from 1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss.”—E. G. Murphy, “The Present South,” p. 40. “No other region, except Poland, ever knew such losses; and Poland ceased to exist. The year 1900 had come and gone before the whole South had regained its per capita wealth of 1860.”—E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 7.
X
NEW ORLEANS
Vicksburg is situated on a solitary, abrupt bluff, at a bend of the Mississippi; whence, I suppose, its strategic importance and its place in history. I climbed to its highest point, and looked out, at sunset, over the burnished river and the Louisiana shore beyond. It seemed one unbroken stretch of dark forest, which might never have been threaded by human foot, or only by that of the Red Man. When the first explorer of the great river climbed the bluff (as he doubtless did), he must have surveyed no very different scene.