Finally it gave to the American people a realizing sense of their own limitless power, which has both strengthened and sobered the popular mind, revealing to it the nation's limitless ability to work iniquity, and awakening it to the Republic's nobler capacity--to work righteousness instead. The conflict so far exalted and emphasized the power of the Republic as to inspire us with a new generosity of forbearance in our dealings with all other nations. It made it easy for us to follow General Grant's rule of right to "deal with other nations as enlightened law requires individuals to deal with each other." Incidentally this war exhausted and impoverished the South as no other war ever exhausted and impoverished any fruitful land. It utterly destroyed the labor system of those states. It put out the light of their prosperity for a time and left their people blindly groping for sustenance. It destroyed a social fabric of exquisite poise and picturesqueness which had endured from the beginning of American colonization. It set society upon its head in the South and replaced historic order with inexpressible chaos. For a time it substituted for a traditional government by the best, an actual and very lawless government by the worst elements of society, exalting ignorance above culture, vice over virtue, and setting a horde of half-savage and suddenly emancipated slaves to direct the destinies of a region to which the country had always reverently looked for exalted patriotism and the wisest statesmanship--the region which had produced Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe; the region that had given to the Republic that greatest and wisest of the jurists of the modern world, John Marshall; the birthplace of Patrick Henry, and George Wythe and George Mason and Henry Clay. Anarchy and chaos and an era of unspeakable disorder succeeded the war as its inevitable consequence and when at last a new order was wrought out of these disturbed conditions, all that was characteristic of the old South had completely passed away. A new era had dawned, coming as a posthumous birth of the conflict of arms. A revolution had been wrought in the social, industrial and economic conditions of a fair land. It brought with it a new material prosperity greater than any that had ever been dreamed of in that region before. It led to the development of resources that had lain dormant for generations. In agriculture alone, the South produces now many times the wealth each year that had been dug out of her fields under the old system. The very greatest cotton crop that was ever grown before the war amounted to 4,669,770 bales; since 1877 no crop so small has been grown in any year, while in recent years the crops have reached the stupendous total of more than 12,000,000 bales in each year.