Wealth the South possesses--large wealth, growing wealth, greater wealth than that section has ever before approached. So agreeable is this state of things that Southern writers are inclined not only to set forth their prosperity but to claim that theirs is the most prosperous part of the whole country and is soon to become the richest. As Edmonds puts it in his "Facts about the South": "Against the poverty, the inexperience, the discredit and doubt at home and abroad of ourselves and our section of 1880, the South, thrilled with energy and hope, stands to-day recognized by the world as that section which of all others in this country or elsewhere has the greatest potentialities for the creation of wealth and the profitable employment of its people." The Southern statements of the poverty of the South from 1865 to 1880 are more easily verified. The tracks of armies outside Virginia and parts of Tennessee were narrow; but at the end of the war the South had exhausted all its movable capital; the banks were broken; the state and Confederate bonds worthless; the railroads ruined; the cities disconsolate. And the labor system was, for a time, much disturbed, though never disrupted. As Henry Watterson, of Kentucky, puts it: "The South! The South! It is no problem at all. The whole story of the South may be summed up in a sentence: She was rich, she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free, and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than ever before. You see it was a ground-hog case. The soil was here, the climate was here, but along with them was a curse, the curse of slavery." The immense increase of wealth and productivity since 1880 is equally unquestionable. When it comes to the claim that it is the most prosperous part of the world, it cannot be accepted offhand. The fact that the South is well off does not prove that it is better off than its neighbors; the wealth and prosperity of the South are always limited by the character of its labor. Calculation of profits, adding of bank balances, cutting of coupons, have to some degree drawn men's minds away from the race question; but on the other hand the demand for labor and the losses of dividends or of opportunities to make money because the labor is inefficient are ever renewed causes of exasperation. At all times the South is subject to reverses like those of other regions. The crisis of 1907 hit that section hard by cutting down the demand for timber, minerals, iron, and other staples, and was one of the factors in a decline in cotton which touched the pocket nerve of the South; and the railroads felt the loss of business. Still, most Southern enterprises weathered the storm, and in 1909 the tide of prosperity is mounting again.