The advance in iron founding was from $2,300,000 in 1850, to $4,100,000 in 1860, a gain of $1,800,000, a very much larger percentage of increase than in the whole country. In the manufacture of steam engines and machinery the gain in all of the country except the South was $15,000,000, while the gain in the South was $4,200,000, the increase in one case being less than 40 per cent, and in the other over 200 per cent. Cotton manufacturing had commenced to attract increased attention, and nearly $12,000,000 were invested in Southern cotton mills. In Georgia especially this industry was thriving, and between 1850 and 1860 the capital so invested in that State nearly doubled. It is true that most of the Southern manufacturing enterprises were comparatively small, but so were those of New England in their early stages. The South’s were blotted out of existence by the war; New England’s were made enormously prosperous, justifying a steady expansion in size, by the same war. In the aggregate, however, the number of Southern factories swelled to very respectable proportions, the total number in 1860 having been 24,590, with an aggregate capital invested of $175,100,000. A study of the facts which have been presented should convince anyone that the South in its early days gave close attention to manufacturing development, and that while later on the great profits in cotton cultivation caused a concentration of the capital and energy of that section in farming operations, yet, after 1850, there came renewed interest in industrial matters, resulting in an astonishing advance in railroad construction and in manufactures. But this is only a small part of the evidence available to conclusively prove the great energy and enterprise of the six and a half million white people who inhabited the South. (_To be Continued._) [Illustration] AN AMERICAN ITALY. _By Erwin Ledyard._