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.

per capita

85

X NEW ORLEANS

Vicksburg is situated on a solitary, abrupt bluff, at a bend of the Mississippi; whence, I 

 Prev. P 54/182 next