The Negro is to be a very important factor in promoting the future prosperity of the country. Already it is manifest that his value to the South as a freed man is far greater than the price formerly set upon him as a chattel. The unrequited toil of the slave is seen in the light of history to be the dearest kind of labor. It was frequently said after the war that the emancipated Negro would be worthless as a laborer; that he was naturally lazy, shiftless, and a shirk, and that he would relapse into a vagabond. But, as a matter of fact, far more good work has been done in the South since the war than before, and for the most part the Negro has done it. Great crops of cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, corn, and other staples have been raised and marketed; mines have been developed, railroads built, manufactories established, and hundreds of other industries opened and pushed in the new era of prosperity which has dawned in the South; and while the capital and brains for this have been furnished by the whites, and largely from the North, the manual labor has been done mainly by the blacks. They have made the New South possible. Take the single item of the cotton they have raised: The twenty-one cotton crops from 1841 to 1861, raised by slave labor, amounted to 58,500,000 bales; the twenty-one cotton crops from 1865 to 1885, raised by free labor, amounted to 93,500,000 bales. There was a gain, with free labor, of nearly 35,000,000 bales, worth $2,000,000,000, or about the full estimated value of all the slaves set free by the war. These facts show the value of the Negro to the South simply as a common laborer. But his importance as a factor in securing a National prosperity is much enhanced when we note his remarkable capacity for improvement. Grant that the great bulk of these eight millions are still in a pitiable condition, poor, ignorant, sometimes vicious, the victims often of barbaric superstitions, living often in hovels rather than houses, without thrift or cleanliness, in crying need of kindly hands to help uplift them to a better life. Yet, granting all this physical and moral destitution among them, it must be said that history gives no record of a race, stripped and stranded so completely as these freedmen were in 1865, that has shown such marvelous progress in a quarter of a century. They have responded wonderfully to every effort made to elevate them, and have shown in themselves such versatility and vigor of intellect as give high promise for their future.