Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/353

 Advance from Appomattox. 345

demoralization of war and the opportunities of conquest over a rich soil and an obedient or helpless population. It is necessary and right, however, for us to reassure ourselves and to gather for our- selves new inspiration for the future by remembering the darkness and the dangers, the wideness and the barrenness of the wilderness through which we have come to conquest and realization.

Against a population of 16,300,000 in 1880, at the close of the dark period of reconstruction, the Southern States now have a population of approximately 25,900,000, with a constantly dimin- ishing proportion of blacks.

Our prodigious increase in values from 1900 to 1906 is shown in official assessed value of property, which has grown from $3,000,- 000,000 in 1870, and $5,266,000,000 in 1900, to $7,750,000,000 in 1906, an increase of more than 46 per cent, in six years.

The progress we have shown in every department of human effort in the recent past provokes the admiration of the world. Great as has been the development of the United States in the past few decades, the South has far-outstripped the rest of the country in relative growth. Our agriculture shows this. Our manufactures proclaim it. Our mining interests emphasize it. Foreign com- merce asserts it.

The figures which express the South's advance in these four great departments of human industry agriculture, mining, manu- factures and commerce are profoundly eloquent.

Ceres, goddess of agriculture, is easily queen, and the products of our farms and gardens, which in 1880, represented the gold equivalent of $660,000,000, yielded to our people last year three times as much, or two thousand million dollars an increase over 1890 of more than 60 per cent.

It is said, and I believe correctly, that your own State of Georgia can raise within her borders every product which is grown to any important commercial extent in any other part of the United States, while our Southern States taken together can grow anything produced elsewhere in the entire world the tea of China, the coffee of Brazil, the indigo and rubber of Africa, the wine of France, the olives of Italy, or the cedars of Lebanon. No nation on earth has a product for export approximating the value of our cotton. It brings to us five times as much as coffee carries to Brazil, and five times as much as tea and silk combined bring to China.

In fact, the total value of all the tea and silk exported from the