Many single mills in the South today represent more than the extent of the whole industry in the most forward Southern State in 1850.[51] Comparison of facts for all the Southern mills with those for the industry of New England perhaps serves to reflect back some light upon the status of the former plants specifically, which has been dwelt upon. Of the plants in the South in this period it has been well observed that "The number of small carding and fulling mills and of little water-driven yarn factories, in this section before 1850, may have approached the number of textile factories in the same region today; ... but few of these establishments became commercial producers."[52] Some evidences of industrial activity in the period to 1840, partly conscious and partly not so, which may be held to presage the later development are to be noticed. A localizing tendency of the textile industry in the decade from 1830 to 1840, held to have been guided by the conjunction of raw cotton, waterwheel and steamboat along the fall line of rivers--at such points as Richmond, Petersburg, Augusta, Columbus, Huntsville, Florence and the vicinity of Montgomery, Mr. Clark holds to be a "slow and unconscious development", during which William Gregg, "a single pioneer of large industry", made a systematic effort to "awaken the South to the peculiar advantages it enjoyed for cotton manufacturing."[53] George Tucker, in his "Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years", published in 1843, was the first to show that at 1840 in the older South slavery was displaying signs of decay from economic causes and that as a system it would finally lapse of its own accord.[54] Niles' Register, May 2, 1840, declared: "The South is rapidly becoming independent in almost every branch of manufacture. There are in North Carolina alone, at this day, a greater number of different kinds than ten years ago there were in the whole of the Southern States", and two weeks later the same paper took from the Raleigh, N.C., Register the assertion that "The enterprise of the citizens of this state is rapidly enabling it to become independent of the North in almost every branch of manufacture."[55]