[57] Quoted from Niles' Register, May 10, 1828, in Pleasants. Mr. Pleasants remarks that not until the late twenties did the leaders of thought awaken to the disintegrating process that had set in two decades before, and he notices the striking fact that in a report to the legislature in 1828 it was said: "Nothing but a change of system can restore health and prosperity at large. With all the material and elements for manufacturing, we annually expend millions for the purchase of articles manufactured in Europe and in the North out of our own raw material. At this rate the state is on the road to bankruptcy. There must be a change. But how is this important revolution to be accomplished? We unhesitatingly answer--by introducing the manufacturing system into our own state and fabricating at least to the extent of our wants.... Our habits and prejudices are against manufacturing, but we must yield to the force of things and profit by the indications of nature. The policy that resists the change is unwise and suicidal. Nothing else can restore us." [58] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County, Vol. I, p. 124. Cf. Ibid., pp. 126-7. [59] Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, pp. 18-19. [60] Clark, History of Manufactures in U.S., pp. 553 ff. Cf. Ibid., in South in Building of Nation, Vol. V, pp. 213-214, and pp. 316 ff. [61] Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, p. 16. [62] "Cheapness of cotton, abundance of water-power, the resources of the coal-fields, when steam began to supplant the dam, the other mineral resources, and the wealth of forests of pine, live oak, cypress, and other woods in which the South abounded, did not even attract from other parts sufficient capital to develop the section to anything like its full extent. No artificial expedients were necessary there. But capital did not come." (Ingle, Southern Sidelights, p. 73.) [63] Quoted in A. B. Hart, The Southern South, pp. 231-232. [64] Helper, p. 25. [65] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, Vol. I, p. 100. [66] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 200-201. [67] Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg, Vol. I, pp. 98-99. This statement is strongly influenced by Tench Coxe. Cf. Ibid., Cotton Growing, pp. 3-4. It has been said of the Irish people by Lord Dufferin that "the entire nation flung itself back upon the land, with as fatal an impulse as when a river, whose current is suddenly impeded, rolls back and drowns the valley which it once fertilized", and Sir Horace Plunkett comments, "The energies, the hopes, nay, the very existence of the race, became thus intimately bound up with agriculture." (Sir Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century, p. 20.) [68] Tompkins, Building and Loan Associations, p. 43. Cf. Ibid., The Cultivation, Picking, Baling and Manufacturing of Cotton from Southern Handpoint, pp. 5-6.