Notwithstanding the great growth of cotton manufacture in the South, the fine qualities are still made elsewhere; and the capital employed, the total wages paid, and the value of output are much greater in the North. The value of the product in South Carolina rose between 1890 and 1905 from $10,000,000 to $50,000,000, but in the same period the value in Massachusetts rose from $100,000,000 to $130,000,000. The output of cotton goods in Columbia, $5,000,000 is less than half the output of Nashua, New Hampshire. The New England states still furnish nearly one half the output of cotton manufactures, measured by value. The Northern states as a whole pay $65,000,000 a year for wages against $27,000,000 in the South; and their product is $270,000,000 against $268,000,000 in the South. It is evident, therefore, that the scepter for cotton manufacture has not yet passed into the hands of the South. The discussion of the economic forces and tendencies of the South in the last three chapters may now be briefly recapitulated. The South is a prosperous and advancing region on the highway to wealth, but advancing rather more slowly than other agricultural sections of the country, and in material wealth far behind the West and farther behind the Middle states and New England. It will be several decades before the South can possibly have as much accumulation as that now in possession of the region which most resembles it in the United States, the Middle West and Far West. Of its sources of wealth, the timber is temporary, mining and iron making limited in area. The chief employment must always be agriculture, and particularly cotton. Cotton culture on a large scale, as now carried on, is an industrial enterprise in which the laborer is likely to be exploited. The advance system is a curse to the South, inciting to extravagance and leading to dreams of wealth not yet created; it is especially bad for the Negro, who is at his best as a renter, or still more as the owner of land. Economically the progress of the negro laborer is very slow, but he is absolutely necessary to the welfare of the South, for no substitute can be discerned. CHAPTER XX PEONAGE