It remains to consider the relation of the race question to cotton manufacture. Long before the Civil War it was seen that the Southern staple was being sent to foreign countries and to the North to be manufactured, and that the South was buying back its own material in cotton goods; therefore some cotton mills were constructed in the South. The labor in these mills seems to have been entirely white, but their product, which was of the coarser qualities, was never large enough to control the market. About 1880 came a new era of cotton manufacture, aided first by the extension of the railway system, second by the development of water power, and third by the discovery that the poor whites make a tolerable mill population. Hence grew up a chain of flourishing factory towns, most of them on or near the "fall line," so as to take advantage of the water powers, and there has been a steady growth of Southern manufactures. In 1887 the Southern mills worked up only 400,000 bales, which was one fifth of the staple used for manufactures in the United States. Twenty years later they were making up 2,400,000 bales, which was one half the consumption. The state of South Carolina alone in 1905 produced manufactures to the amount of $79,000,000. The first thing to notice in this manufacture is that the mill hands are still exclusively white. Several efforts have been made in Columbia, Charleston, and elsewhere to carry on cotton mills with negro labor, and a few negro capitalists have built mills in which they expected to employ people of their own race; but every one of these experiments seems to have been a failure, partly because of the ignorance of the average Negro who could be drawn into the industry, and partly because of his irregularity. The Poor Whites do not make by any means the best mill help, and their output of yards per hand is considerably less than that in the Northern states. The supply of white labor also shows signs of depletion, though Mountain Whites are being brought down; it is still a question whether they will settle in the new places, or whether after they have saved money they will return to their mountains. Hence the frantic efforts to bring in mill hands from outside the South. Northern hands will not accept a lower wage scale and do not like the social conditions. It is plain that the Southern cotton manufacture is entirely dependent upon the supply of native white labor.