COTTON 57 



paid for the South's great staple crop. The archi- 

 tect will tell you that he is building better houses 

 than ever before; the furniture dealer will tell you 

 that he is shipping more furniture than ever before ; 

 the manufacturer of implements and machinery will 

 acknowledge that Southern progress astounds him; 

 the schools report record-breaking openings; the 

 newspaper subscription gains threaten to overtake 

 the circulation manager's estimates; and even the 

 preacher joins in with the story that for once his 

 salary is paid promptly and in full, and that a ser- 

 mon on foreign missions is now unprecedentedly 

 effective. 



IT MEANS THE COMING OF THE NEW SOUTH 



These things cannot fail to have the most far- 

 reaching influence upon every phase of Southern 

 life. Prosperity will bring more education, more 

 travel, greater contentment, more liberal thought 

 in fact as Sidney Lanier said nearly thirty years 

 ago: 



"One has only to remember that whatever crop 

 we reap in the future whether it be a crop of 

 poems, of paintings, of symphonies, of constitu- 

 tional safeguards, of virtuous behaviors, of religious 

 exaltations we have got to bring it out of the 

 ground with palpable plows and with plain farmer's 

 forethought, in order to see that a vital revolution 

 in the farming economy of the South, if it is actu- 

 ally occurring, is necessarily carrying with it all fu- 

 ture Southern politics and Southern relations and 

 Southern art, and that therefore such an agricul- 

 tural change is the one substantial fact upon which 

 any really New South can be predicted." 



