There are in the industrial community of Gastonia, however, and in certain individual mills and managers, particularly in North Carolina, signs, that point to a catching up of internal capacities with external maturity. There is being developed--not yet clearly seen by any means, and in not a few points apparently contradicted[398]--a manufacturing spirit in the South, an industrial faculty that is able to cope with difficult conditions, the results of economic progress. This promises that the South is learning after forty years what Edward Atkinson said it did not know, the difference between a penny and a nickel. It indicates that the South will be meeting narrow margins of profit with close figuring of the costs of production. It is natural to turn from the subject of profits to that of dividends. There is in the history of the mills a general parallel between the two, with, however, certain variations arising from the fact that the industry has been and is now in constant process of growth. With the exception of perhaps a few years, earnings could always be profitably invested in the business,[399] particularly in expansions of plant.[400] As will be seen in more detail later, the peculiar conditions under which the mills took their rise involved indebtedness for plant and for running capital, and earnings had to go to pay interest and principal of this. The Augusta Factory was founded in 1847,[401] and, with Graniteville nearby, though in South Carolina, resembled in its earlier years, and to a diminished extent still does, the English and Continental textile manufactories.[402] They have both fallen upon evil days more recently. The Augusta Factory made 5 per cent. quarterly dividends for eight years and nine months from its founding.[403] In 1858, eleven years after establishment, the plant was sold to a company with Wm. H. Jackson at its head, for the sum of $140,000. Though the stockholders in the Jackson Company paid $60,000 for repairs to the property, the purchase price, payable in instalments for ten years, was made up from profits. The mill at the close of the war was the wealthiest in the South. It was said in 1884 that it had had an uninterrupted course of prosperity since the war. From 1865 to 1880 the company paid average annual dividends of 14 21/32 per cent.[404] In 1880 the stock of the mills at Augusta, Georgia, paid about 8 per cent. interest per annum, in semi-annual and quarterly dividends.[405] Under Col. H. H. Hickman's management of Graniteville there were regular dividends of 10 per cent.[406] The son of this former president, and until recently himself president of the mill as his father's successor, said: "Graniteville was so successful it had a large influence. It never ceased operation, and to my certain knowledge it had a fifty-year record of dividends."[407]