To vaunt property figures of the South of 1860 by including, as Mr. Edmonds has done, the value of slaves, is an obvious error; and especially because of the failure to note the inclusion of this factor, the spirit of the other exhibits is cast in doubt. Though legally they were property, in the social-economic sense the slaves did not constitute capital any more than their owners represented capital. The question is rather whether this part of the population, as productive agents under the system of enforced labor, did not mean a liability and not an asset at all.[127] Mr. Edmonds is guilty sometimes of careless statement, as when he says, "The Southern people do not lack in energy or enterprise, nor did they prior to 1860.... From the settlement of the colonies until 1860 the business record proves this."[128] Or again, "the energy and enterprise displayed by the South in the extension of its agricultural interests was fully as great as the energy displayed in the development of New England's manufactures or that of the pioneers who opened up the West to civilization."[129] Such expressions, it will presently be shown, proceed from a loyalty to the South and a just desire to defend her against assault respecting her part in post-bellum development, but facts brought out in these pages show the mistaken zeal in seeking to place the old South abreast in industry or even agriculture. Allowing what is perhaps the exciting cause of Mr. Edmonds' argument to appear from his own context, light is shed in the following sentences: "... 'The New South', a term which is so popular everywhere except in the South, is supposed to represent a country of different ideas and different business methods from those which prevailed in the old ante-bellum days.... Its use ... as intended to convey the meaning that the South of late years is something entirely new and foreign to this section, something which has been brought about by an infusion of outside energy and money is wholly unjust to the South of the past and present. It needs but little investigation to show that prior to the war the South was fully abreast of the times in all business interests, and that the wonderful industrial growth which has come since 1880 has been due mainly to Southern men and Southern money. The South heartily welcomes the investment of outside capital and the immigration of all good people ... but it insists that it shall receive from the world the measure of credit to which it is entitled for the accomplishment of its own people." And then he instances the cotton mills and Birmingham and Atlanta.[130] His explanation of the inactivity in the South for ten or fifteen years following the war, in the fact and causes of which he is entirely correct,[131] bears out the belief, clearly indicated in the passage just quoted, that it is his real purpose to accord to the ante-bellum South her deserved praise. However, he overreached in trying to establish anything