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." 
