Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/304

290 so in respect to the colored population on Sundays and holidays. After balancing higher speed against the finer number, this last element of greater power to purchase would lead us to assume, or to expect to find, a steady but moderate increase in the ratio of spindles to population: when I give the facts, I think many will be somewhat surprised at the justification which the figures will give of this hypothesis.

In treating the conditions of the South I date my computations from the year 1870. This was the year in which the worst effects of the war had been in part overcome. In 1870 our Southern friends made a fair beginning, on which they continued in rather slow and even measure in their progress until about 1880, when at last the new industries of the new South began to make progress with leaps and bounds; the greatest impetus being imputed to the Atlanta Cotton Exhibition by the Southerners themselves. It seems as if the display in this exhibition had shown to themselves, even for the first time, the wealth of minerals, of timber, and of other resources which proved to them that cotton was very far from being king even of its own land.

There is another very important factor which enters into this consideration to which no attention has been given in any treatise upon Southern manufactures that I have yet seen, namely, the great number of people in the Southern States who were clad in homespun or in hand-woven fabrics, both before the war and throughout the period of reconstruction down to 1870.

The moment attention is called to this element in the question, all will doubtless admit that a change from homespun to factory-made goods, whatever its measure may have been, was the equivalent of so much added population and so much increased demand for the products of the cotton-factories. Conversely, in any computation of the ratio of spindles to population at different dates, a deduction must be made in 1860 and 1870 for those who were at these respective dates clothed in hand-made fabrics. Perhaps it may be said, and perhaps it may rightly be said, that if an allowance must be made according to each man's judgment for all these variable elements of the problem, what dependence can be put upon the final figures? Each one may answer his own question or doubt in his own way. I shall only give what appear to be the facts, and I will say, as I have so often said before, that all statistics, unless qualified by sound judgment, are mere rubbish, not worth the compilation. I think many may be somewhat surprised, however, by the apparent certainty of the rule presented.

I have corresponded with a large number of my old Southern friends in respect to the homespun consumption of former times. I omit Texas from among the Southern States, for the reason that