536

THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

sion the diversion of traffic to Southern ports, for a marked and noticeable increase of exports from these points has there taken place.

In 1881 the value of the produce exported from the Southern ports was $200,- 000,000. In 1891 it had increased to $300,000,000. The further fact is established that the assessed value of property per capita in 1881 was $142, which in 1891 had advanced to $232, while the capital of the national banks in the South increased within these past ten years from $45,000,000 to $95,000,000.

As the agricultural industries of the Southern States are the foundation of their prosperity, they demand priority of consideration in the present investigation. Among them, cotton, the greatest staple production of the world, stands unquestionably fore­most; for the ramifications of interests interwoven in the cotton trade, which embrace the planter, manufacturer, merchant and exporter, aggregate a colossal amount of capi­tal and absorb the energies, ingenuity and genius of millions of men. The importance, therefore, of this textile upon the commercial and financial destinies of all communi­ties can not be over-estimated.

The Southern States of America furnish eighty per cent of the raw cotton con­sumption of the whole world, retaining for home uses one-third of the quantity pro­duced, the rest going to foreign markets. Of late years capital and enterprise have combined to erect magnificent cotton mills throughout all the Southern States.

Nor could a more sagacious investment be devised, for the demonstration seems plain that if Great Britain (which has no raw cotton at command and must import its raw material from foreign countries, chiefly from the Southern States) finds it profit­able to establish and maintain gigantic cotton mills, the South would clearly reap a larger profit by locating and working mills in close proximity to her own cotton fields. Great Britain’s supremacy in cotton manufacture is solely owing to the fact that it has been the home of the most improved applications of machinery to that industry. The Eastern mills of the United States, by their present superior equipment, now rival those of Lancashire, while those splendid manufacturing structures being now erected in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, will eventually outstrip both in the near coming years, because of the superior economic conditions which they control.

These Southern cotton mills embody the newest forms of improved machinery, and are located close to the raw material they employ.

Besides the consideration of cheap and contented labor, that of cheap fuel is of the utmost importance for the success of the cotton mill. In Manchester the great cost of extracting coal from the deep beds of the coal mines of England makes the price of that commodity far higher than it is in the Southern States, where limitless coal mines abound, whose surface strata alone is being utilized by easy obtainment and at a small cost.

But the difficulties of climate, distance, labor and fuel are all obviated in the states of the South. Holding, therefore, these splendid advantages, the states of the South will naturally seek for a widening foreign market. This she will surely find beyond her European trade in China and Japan and the islands in the Pacific, when direct communications will be established with those countries through the cutting of the isthmus which unites the two Americas, which engineering feat has now become the imperious commercial necessity of this age. The states of the South, command­ing a short and direct route, with her inexhaustible forests at hand wherewith to build the necessary shipping for this trade, would supply this rich and prolific market with their varied products and manufactures. Nor could any section or outside power successfully compete with them; for a closer proximity gives, necessarily, a suprem­acy none may dispute.

The history of the Suez Canal, which has poured millions into the coffers of England, and that of the Sault Ste. Marie’s Canal, on the great northern lakes, gives the basis for the assumption that the tonnage of vessels passing through annually would average nine million at a low estimate.

By opening this canal, breaking bulk in. transit, a matter of immense monetary