SOURCES OF SOUTHERN WEALTH. By Austin P. Foster. In the undeveloped resources of the South lie dormant the possibilities of fortune that “far surpass the wealth of Ormus or of Ind.” For more than two centuries the incomparable climate and soil of this section have commanded the admiration of the world; and during this period fortunes were amassed purely by agriculture, mainly in the last century by cotton, and were handed down from father to son, until the corner stone of the industrial system was wrenched loose by a fratricidal war, and anarchy for a time supervened. As Henry Watterson pithily puts it: “The whole story of the South may be summed up in a sentence: She was rich, and she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free, and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than ever before.” Yet what a change from the happy years of ante-bellum prosperity, when the South was by far the wealthiest section of the country, to the desolation, the poverty and the criminal oppression of reconstruction times! After four years of the most sanguinary strife in the history of the world the Southern soldier took up the battle of existence and of maintenance and of rehabilitation. Let Henry W. Grady tell the situation: “What does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barn empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions gone; without money, credit, employment, material training; and besides all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence—the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves. “What does he do—this hero in gray with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plow, and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June; women reared in luxury cut up their dresses and made breeches for their husbands, and, with a patience and heroism that fit women always as a garment, gave their hands to work.”