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
farm, and in the shops, for home consumption, and already sends to the
North and West several manufactured products. With iron, coal, timber
contiguous and easily obtained, the amount sent out is certain to
increase as the labor becomes more skilful. The most striking industrial
development today is in iron, coal, lumber, and marbles; the more
encouraging for the self-sustaining life of the Southern people is the
multiplication of small industries in nearly every city I visited.
When I have been asked what impressed me most in this hasty tour, I have
always said that the most notable thing was that everybody was at work.
In many cities this was literally true: every man, woman, and child
was actively employed, and in most there were fewer idlers than in many
Northern towns. There are, of course, slow places, antiquated methods,
easy-going ways, a-hundred-years-behind-the-time makeshifts, but the
spirit in all the centres, and leavening the whole country, is work.
Perhaps the greatest revolution of all in Southern sentiment is in
regard to the dignity of labor. Labor is honorable, made so by the
example of the best in the land. There are, no doubt, fossils or
Bourbons, sitting in the midst of the ruins of their estates, martyrs
to an ancient pride; but usually the leaders in business and enterprise
bear names well known in politics and society. The nonsense that it is
beneath the dignity of any man or woman to work for a living is pretty
much eliminated from the Southern mind. It still remains true that the
Anglo-Saxon type is prevalent in the South; but in all the cities the
business sign-boards show that the enterprising Hebrew is increasingly
prominent as merchant and trader, and he is becoming a plantation owner
as well.
It cannot be too strongly impressed upon the public mind that the South,
to use a comprehensible phrase, “has joined the procession.” Its mind is
turned to the development of its resources, to business, to enterprise,
to education, to economic problems; it is marching with the North in the
same purpose of wealth by industry. It is true that the railways,
mines, and furnaces could not have been without enormous investments of
Northern capital, but I was continually surprised to find so many and
important local industries the result solely of home capital, made and
saved since the war.
In this industrial change, in the growth of manufactures, the Southern
people are necessarily divided on the national economic problems.
Speaking of it purely from the side of political economy and not of
politics, great sections of the South—whole States, in fact—are becoming
more in favor of “protection” every day. All theories aside, whenever
a man begins to work up the raw material at hand into manufactured
articles for the market, he thinks that the revenue should be so
adjusted as to help and not to hinder him.
Underlying everything else is the negro problem. It is the most
difficult ever given to a people to solve.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account