Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/33

Rh tics that had more than an average colored population pledged above the average of the State, thtat the 51 counties that pledged 15 per cent over the average for the State had 4 per cent over an average of the colored population of the State. In sales the record of the Negroes is equally incomplete. No effort whatever has been made to ascertain the amount of Stamps owned by Negroes. But it is worth noting that Edgecombe County—one of the two counties of the State that oversold its allotment, the other being Forsyth—has a population 60 per cent colored.

If on measures North Carolina's War Savings record in terms of money he finds that the record is incomplete. That is, North Carolina, asked to sell among its people $48,666,380, sold only $27,649,397; asked to sell 100 per cent of its allotment, it sold only 56.80 per cent; asked to invest $20 per capital, it invested only $11.36; asked to invest nearly 5 per cent of its wealth in War Savings Stamps, it invested only 2.71 per cent.

The success of the War Savings Campaign should not be judged so much by the amount of money it turned into the Treasury of the United States as by the effect it had upon the life and character of the people. The tangible fruit of the campaign, of course, is twenty-seven and one-half million dollars saved in 1918 and paid back in 1923 to constitute an immense working capital distributed among, perhaps, seven hundred and fifty thousand people of every walk of life. Altogether incalculable is the good that this huge sum did in paying wages, developing resources, building schools and churches and in twenty-seven and one-half million dollars not have been merely the seed from which grew many blessings that cannot be counted in terms of money or even of material prosperity?

At the end of the campaign of 1918 a questionnaire was submitted to each county chairman in which the question was asked: "In what respects do you consider that the War Savings Campaign of 1918 did the people of your county good?" The following is a symposium of their answers.

The War Savings Campaign made our people more thrifty. Thrift is the virtue which manifests itself in habits of industry and economy.

The War Savings Campaign made people more industrious by convincing them of the need of increased production and by arousing in them the desire to produce more as a means of help-