The actual figures for the present conditions of the South are sufficiently attractive. During the four years 1904-1907 the big crops and high price of cotton gave to the South such prosperity as it had never known before, the total output being nearly fifty million bales, which sold, in cash, for about 2,700 million dollars. This happy result was reflected in every city and every county of the rural South, for old debts were paid, new houses built, land doubled or even trebled in value, and a spirit of hopefulness pervaded the whole population. A buoyancy is reflected in the press, and particularly in the _Manufacturers' Record_ of Baltimore, the leading Southern trade paper. "The South," says the _Record_, "is now throughout the world recognized as the predestined center of the earth, based on greater natural advantages that can be found anywhere else on the globe." Or as another Southern paper put it some years ago: "In 1860 the Richest Part of the Country--In 1870 the Poorest--In 1880 Signs of Improvement--In 1889 regaining the position of 1860." Nobody can be more pleased with Southern prosperity than New Englanders, who have long since found out that the richer other sections of the country become, the more business Northerners have with those sections; if there are directions in which the South is making more rapid progress than the North, it should be candidly acknowledged. Nobody can visit thriving cities like Richmond, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans, and the galaxy of future centers of population in Texas, without hearty pleasure in the increasing evidences of civilization, but it is very unevenly distributed. Off the main lines of transportation the towns are still ill-built and unprogressive, and the greater part of the area of the South is no farther along than states like Illinois and Minnesota were in the late sixties. It is, however, a ticklish thing to make these comparisons, because many Southerners, and particularly Southern newspapers, consider it an attack upon the South to intimate that it is still much improvable. As the _Macon Telegraph_ said a few months ago: "After all what does it matter that a Harvard professor should consider us lazy and not even excuse us on the ground that we are victims of the hookworm? We still have the right to go on expanding the figures relating to our remarkable industrial upbuilding, until we have driven New England out of the business of cotton manufacturing."