300 MARINE FISHERIES OF NORTH CAROLINA 



climate and simple life, where essential physical wants are provided without 

 great effort or hardship; the facilities in the country and seaside villages are 

 primitive, but sufficient if wants are few and ambition is low. Judged by 

 sophisticated standards, life might appear to be unexciting and the region 

 unable to offer its young people generally sufficient inducement to hold them 

 in large numbers. It is too easy to seek greener pastures elsewhere. We 

 made no survey of social conditions. It is now fashionable to assume that 

 crime, dereliction, juvenile delinquency and general degradation commonly 

 go along with poverty and overcrowding, especially in large cities. In the 

 region we are considering there is certainly no overcrowding (density of 

 population 36.8 per sq. mi.). In some of the counties the density of popula- 

 tion itself appears to be too low for economic vigor. There may be poverty 

 in the sense of deficiency of cash income and subsistence farming, but 

 apparently not to the extent of destitution, since, as has been pointed out, 

 the natural conditions make simple subsistence relatively easy to find. 

 If there is malnutrition it can be ascribed not to lack of food or the oppor- 

 tunity to obtain it, but rather to lack of interest in and knowledge of good 

 food as the basis of health and a source of enjoyment. There is a noticeable 

 lack of man-made beauty or signs of pride in habitation, clothes, or sur- 

 roundings. We made no survey of the state of health or prevalence of disease 

 of the inhabitants. 



The region as a whole has rich natural resources in its farm land, forests, 

 and fisheries but contents itself mainly with the production and sale of bulk 

 commodities in agriculture and fisheries, and to some extent the first step 

 of manufacture, as in rough sawed lumber, without pursuit of the many 

 opportunities for further enrichment by more advanced manufacture of 

 finished consumer goods, alertness in the adoption of the many technical 

 improvements in the production of wealth, or even adequate exploitation of 

 the natural resources. It can hardly be doubted that the main impediment to 

 what we call progress is that the human qualities of creative enterprise and 

 desire and ambition for more and better things have not had adequate stimu- 

 lation. Whether the spirit of enterprise can be engendered or stimulated by 

 action from without the region, or whether it must necessarily arise spon- 

 taneously from within, cannot be decided by any data at hand, but since 

 it has not already spontaneously arisen to any marked extent, whatever 

 action is undertaken must proceed in the faith that it can be engendered 

 by some form of intervention, such as a program of scientific research and 

 promotion. 



