"A study of the facts ... should convince anyone that the South in its early days gave close attention to manufacturing development,[124] and that while later on the great profits in cultivation caused a contraction 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."[125] Figures are set up to show the favorable economic condition of the South in 1860 as compared with the North, and these head up naturally in the observation that, "Blot out of existence in one night every manufacturing enterprise in the whole country, with all the capital employed, (he was writing in 1894) and the loss would not equal that sustained by the South as a result of the war.... New England and the Middle States, having grown rich by the war, almost trebled their property (from 1860 to 1870) while the South drops from the first place to the third. In 1860 it outranked the Northern section by $750,000,000."[126] In criticism of these quotations specifically it is to be said that the early development in industrial pursuits and the thorough lapse before 1840 are properly observed. The present writer believes that Mr. Edmonds has exaggerated in his own mind both the spirit for manufactures, particularly in the decade from 1850 to 1860, and the extent of their establishment. The recital that there were 24,590 plants, with an investment of $175,100,000, seems at first to be striking, but a simple division shows that on an average this made the investment in each only $7,144.37, which is surely not indicative of considerable importance. Many of the enterprises must have been much smaller than would be represented by this average, and the few which were a great deal larger were rare exceptions. The very disparity in size of establishments points away from any concerted movement toward manufacturing. As to the railroad construction, much of it was narrow-gauge, and all of the facts tend to show that railroads were looked upon as facilitating commerce rather than manufactures; even after the war the pet scheme to build a railroad over the mountains gathered sentiment in the long-cherished desire to link Charleston with "the producing interior" typefied in Cincinnati; as rails were laid, piecemeal, through the Piedmont, advantages afforded by them for the erection of factories were seldom mentioned, and their utility in tapping pools of available labor was not considered. The easier transport of cotton and the development of the South Atlantic ports were the thoughts uppermost.