typhoon will silt up those Texan lagoon harbors which have no great river behind to scour them out. Mobile, which is a place with increasing foreign commerce, can never hope to lead deep water to its present wharves, but about twenty-two miles below the city is an opportunity to bring large ships nearly inshore, and that is likely to be the future port of Mobile. Pensacola is the special favorite of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, but seems to have no advantages which will bring it ahead of its neighbor Mobile. Of the lower Atlantic ports, Fernandina, Brunswick, Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington are all limited in the depth of water, and several of them require difficult river navigation. The deep-water ports of Baltimore on the Chesapeake, and Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Newport News on the lower James, are on the extreme borders of the South and depend for their prosperity chiefly on Western commerce. The transportation business of the South, as in other parts of the Union, has drifted into the hands of a comparatively few large corporations. The Southern Railroad, the Atlantic Coast Line, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Louisville & Nashville include nearly all the railroads between Virginia and Mississippi. The Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, Norfolk & Western, and the new Virginia Railroad connect the tide water of Virginia and North Carolina with the West. The Louisville & Nashville, Illinois Central, the Missouri Pacific and Queen and Crescent roads stretch southward from the Middle Western states to the Gulf. In Texas three or four railway systems compete for the business between the upper trans-Mississippi country and the Gulf, and there is a bewildering complex of branch lines. The net result is that the South outside the mountains is gridironed with railways. The areas more than ten miles from a railroad line in the South are now comparatively small. For this reason may be expected a more rapid development of the resources and wealth of that section in the next ten years than in the last decade. CHAPTER XVII COMPARATIVE WEALTH