Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/354

 346 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Chinese empire is not quite sufficient to pay China's bill for the manufactured cotton goods which she imports.

The Secretary of Agriculture, in his report to Congress a few weeks ago, made the declaration that the " National welfare has been promoted by a few revolutions in agriculture and economics to the extent that it has been, and will be, promoted by ten cent cotton. The greater part of the cotton planters are out of their former bondage to future maintenances, and they are paying no enormous rates of interest for advancements rates which we estimated fifteen years ago to average 40 per cent, a year."

The products of our forests have grown from nine and thirty millions in 1880 to more than $250,000,000 last year. Southern forests are now the country's main reservoirs of timber, and, as I have stood on the docks at Hamburg, I have seen navies of merchantmen arriving loaded down with the timber which our Southern lumbermen were exchanging for the foreigner's gold. Our plains and pastures and the blue grass meadows of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee can raise cattle enough to supply tiie continent.

From the mines and quarries of our hillsides and mountains were extracted last year $260,000,000 in value against $20,000,000 in 1880, 1200 per cent, increase in mining, the results in 1905 in the South being three times as great as from all the mines and quarries in New England.

In foreign commerce against exports of $261,000,000 from Southern ports in 1880, we find our exports in 1906 amount to $642,000,000. During the past five years our exports have increased more than 21 percent., while the increase for all the other ports of the country are less than 15 per cent. In the same five years the imports of the United States increased 46 per cent., while the increase of imports throughout Southern harbors exceeded 75 per cent.

During the past three years the South exported raw cotton alone to foreign countries to the value of approximately twelve hundred million dollars. In the fiscal year, 1905-' 6, in addition to raw cotton exported, we sent over 711,000,000 yards of cotton cloth, or enough to furnish a suit of clothing to each of 100,000,000 Chinese, or other Orientals, at seven yards per capita.

The mighty development in the cotton milling industry in the