Studies in the South and West, with Comments on CanadaWarner, Charles Dudley
History
Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada
Warner, Charles Dudley
Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
accounts to the others, lie never has the least trouble.
One cannot speak too highly of the private schools in the South,
especially of those for young women. I do not know what they were before
the war, probably mainly devoted to “accomplishments,” as most of girls’
schools in the North were. Now most of them are wider in range, thorough
in discipline, excellent in all the modern methods. Some of them, under
accomplished women, are entirely in line with the best in the country.
Before leaving this general subject of education, it is necessary to
say that the advisability of industrial training, as supplementary to
book-learning, is growing in favor, and that in some colored schools it
is tried with good results.
When we come to the New Industrial South the change is marvellous, and
so vast and various that I scarcely know where to begin in a short
paper that cannot go much into details. Instead of a South devoted
to agriculture and politics, we find a South wide awake to business,
excited and even astonished at the development of its own immense
resources in metals, marbles, coal, timber, fertilizers, eagerly laying
lines of communication, rapidly opening mines, building furnaces,
founderies, and all sorts of shops for utilizing the native riches. It
is like the discovery of a new world. When the Northerner finds great
founderies in Virginia using only (with slight exceptions) the products
of Virginia iron and coal mines; when he finds Alabama and Tennessee
making iron so good and so cheap that it finds ready market in
Pennsylvania, and founderies multiplying near the great furnaces for
supplying Northern markets; when he finds cotton-mills running to full
capacity on grades of cheap cottons universally in demand throughout the
South and South-west; when he finds small industries, such as paper-box
factories and wooden bucket and tub factories, sending all they can make
into the North and widely over the West; when he sees the loads of most
beautiful marbles shipped North; when he learns that some of the largest
and most important engines and mill machinery were made in Southern
shops; when he finds in Richmond a “pole locomotive,” made to run on
logs laid end to end, and drag out from Michigan forests and Southern
swamps lumber hitherto inaccessible; when he sees worn-out highlands
in Georgia and Carolina bear more cotton than ever before by help of a
fertilizer the base of which is the cotton-seed itself (worth more as
a fertilizer than it was before the oil was extracted from it); when
he sees a multitude of small shops giving employment to men, women, and
children who never had any work of that sort to do before; and when he
sees Roanoke iron cast in Richmond into car-irons, and returned to a
car-factory in Roanoke which last year sold three hundred cars to the
New York and New England Railroad—he begins to open his eyes. The South
is manufacturing a great variety of things needed in the house, on the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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