Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/616

598 conditions, in which the majority of white men were not Southern born and Southern bred in each so-called "carpet-bag Legislature." If, then, the ignorant blacks were led to pervert the trust that was imposed upon them, they were not led thereto by the Northern "carpet-baggers."

The very necessities of society made it necessary that this perversion of the powers of government should be stopped. It was done; and the old colored man at the Capitol in South Carolina explained the case in a single phrase when I asked him why the Republican Governor had been thrown out and Wade Hampton elected the year before; his answer was, "Yer can't put igmance top o' 'telligence and make it stay dar." It might be wise for those who are pressing the "Force bill" in the present Congress to take counsel from this old colored man. No force bill can "put ig'nance on top o' 'telligence and make it stay dar," but the enactment of such a measure will make it very plain that intelligence must displace ignorance of the present conditions of the South in many of the seats in the present House and Senate.

Under these adverse conditions—with that element of property which had been the main-stay of its citizens totally destroyed, its railway system torn up, its fields devastated, its fences burned, and many of its most important mills and works utterly destroyed; without capital, without inherited skill or aptitude—the South entered upon new fields of industry, exposed to the absolutely free and unrestricted competition of the Northern farmers, the Northern miners, the Northern manufacturers and the Northern artisans and mechanics in every branch of work.

No one can yet measure the progress which has been made in all the arts and industries which are necessary to civilized life in that great Southland. I have lately been on a hasty trip as far as New Orleans; I have witnessed the progress of white and black alike; progress upon the farm, in the field, in the great factory, in the workshop; progress in better conditions of life, in higher wages and in lower cost, in every town and city and wherever the railway has penetrated. It is a complete proof that diversity of employment establishes itself in spite of legislation and in spite of every bad form of taxation.

If you will glance over the analysis of the occupations of the people of the several States in the census of 1880, limiting your observation to those which had not been subject to the indignity of slavery, you will find that in a very short time after a State or Territory is open to settlement a certain balance of occupations establishes itself. Where the land is poor, as in New England, the larger number will be occupied in the manufacturing and mechanic arts; where the land is good, and the connection with the markets established, there may be for a time an excess in