The industrial recovery of the South was unexpectedly slow. The industrial arrangements of the country were utterly overthrown. Population had diminished; capital had disappeared; cultivation, excepting of articles necessary for food, had ceased; many of the coloured labourers had fled northwards, and the labour of those who remained had to be arranged for on conditions altogether new and unknown. The reconstruction of the shattered fragments of an industrial system was inevitably a tedious and difficult work. But the wholesome pressure of necessity,--laid equally on white men and on black,--obliged both to adapt themselves to the circumstances in which they were placed. The planters drew together as many labourers as they could obtain and were able to pay for, and cultivated such portions of their lands as they could thus overtake. The negroes were always ready to serve any man who paid regular wages; but it very often happened, at the outset, that there was no man with money enough to do that. In such cases the negroes cultivated for their own behoof. The progress made in reconquering the neglected soil was very slow. But in that fertile land no effort of man is suffered to go without a bountiful reward. Every succeeding crop left the cultivator a little richer than he had been before. Every seed-time witnessed a larger area under cultivation, until at length the quantity of cotton produced is as large as it had ever been before the war, and promises steadily to increase. A new and better industrial system gradually arose--less picturesque than that which had been destroyed, but no longer founded in wrong, and therefore more enduring and more beneficial to master as well as to servant. * * * * *