"The assumption is not well founded. Instead of industrial inaction we find from the beginnings of Southern history an industrial movement, characteristic and sometimes even provincial in its methods, but presenting a consistent and creditable development up to the very hour of the Civil War. The issue of this war meant no mere economic reversal. It meant economic catastrophe, drastic, desolate, without respect of persons, classes or localities.... Thus the later story of the industrial South is but a story of reemergence."[133] There are then outlined the steps of Mr. Edmonds' argument, except that Murphy failed to make clear the almost total lapse of industrial activity by 1840. The incentive to discover an industrial past for the section, which Mr. Edmonds found in the desire to establish the South as the magician of her ante-bellum awakening, is matched in Murphy's motive by a more subtle design. In one place he said: "... the most distinctive element in the economic movement of this period (1880 to 1900) is the increasingly dominant position of manufactures as contrasted with agriculture. This industrial revival is but the reemergence of the tendency which we found so manifest in the statistics of 1860. It is but one reassertion of the genius of the old South."[134] Here with his absolute conception of the ante-bellum South is hinted the purpose which really animated it. That in speaking of the post-bellum development as "one reassertion of the genius of the old South" he did not mean, as very easily might be supposed, that through the earlier history of the section had run a genius for industrialism, is made clear in the following passage, which, though it refers particularly to social relationships, is pertinent for the industrial bearings: "The old South was the real nucleus of the new nationalism. The old South, or in a more general sense the South of responsibility, the men of family, the planter class, the official soldiery, or (if you please) the aristocracy,--the South that had had power, and to whom power had taught those truths of life, those dignities and fidelities of temper, which power always teaches men,--this older South was the true basis of an enduring peace between the sections and between the races." He regretted that this old South was not enabled to come into force until after Reconstruction because "a doubt was put upon its word given at Appomattox. Its representatives were subjected to disfranchisement. Power was struck from its hands. Its sense of responsibility was wounded and confused."[135]