Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 23.djvu/25

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material wraith of the wide and rich territory it had donated to the general estate turning away from its own ports, and Norfolk, the natural entrepot of commerce, surpassed by New York. The North- ern section grew rapidly because the Northeast became the Merchant, the Hanker, the Transportation agent, and at lengh the Manufacturer of the Country, by which adjustment of business relations it turned its money over everyday and profited by every turn of the incoming and outging trade, while the South made one annual deal. Immi- gration forced through its ports poured by special inducements upon the territory of the West, and the immigrants became customers of the East. The sale of its slaves brought no small amount of ready money to those who bargained them to the South, and early eman- cipation of its Negroes freed from the North from bonds which the South was obliged longer to wear. Great governmental aids fol- lowed each other thick and fast in the form of bounties, tariffs, con- tracts and the like, in the disbursement of which the large percentage went away from the South. Grants to build railroads with public lands which Southern cessions and policy had secured to the National wealth exceeded the area of European empires, and of which the South received not one-fifth of its share. The Southern people make no unfair complaint at the energy with which these and other unnamed advantages were seized, but they do rebuke all unjust sneers which stigmatize them as an unprogressive race, and the whole South makes a powerful protest against this injustice by the evidence of its old thrift in maintaining a prosperous existence in the Union for nearly a century by the use of only one-tenth of its resources, and the still more significant display of its rapid rise in recent years from utter prostration 1 through the masterful spirit of its >wn people. The transformation of the Southern wilds into fruitful fields, from which have gone Northward in sixty-five years two hundred and fifty millions cotton bales, worth forty dollars per bale, beside cereals and fruits, tobacco, lumber and other products of four- fold greater value, should be accredited to the enterprise of the dili- gent Southerner. It is strange that a people who hibernate nearly half the year in enforced idleness, while the workingman of the genial South is out with the morning lark and pursues his calling through the months of winter as well as summer, can think of such .1 worker as indolent. When we survey the deep repose of many Eastern towns which slumber in unprogressive if not "innocuous desuetude," we rationally inquire why Southern cities are so specially characterized as ' ' sleepy boroughs ' ' ? We will not forget that the