The uselessness of attempting a political salvation as contrasted with the logic of giving all energy to the building up of the South materially, clearly shown in the passage quoted, occurs time and time again.[139] President C. C. Baldwin, of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, born in Maryland but for many years resident in New York, and competent to take a comprehensive view of the South and its problems, said in an interview with the New York Herald in 1881, after the new program had gotten under way: "The commercial men of the states fully appreciate the situation.... They now see clearly how very little politics have done for them, and seriously turn toward the real 'reconstruction' which active trade will inaugurate. All the war issues are dead and buried except to a few politicians who misrepresent their constituents and merely use the language of the past to give them, personally, a passing prominence. True, we hear a great deal more about the men who stand forth prominently as the advocates of these dead issues than we do of the thousands of young and energetic Southern men who are building cotton and woollen mills; who are opening mines and starting iron, copper and zinc furnaces, or who are relaying the roads between the Atlantic and the Ohio and the Gulf. These men don't talk, they don't write books, they don't go to the Legislature or to Congress. They speak, trumpet toned, in results, however. The people of the South have suffered--it is not pertinent whether we regard their sufferings as just or unjust--but they have put aside mourning and are ready for work."[140] The Sumter, S.C., Southern voiced the same idea: "The Southern people, outside of the professional politicians, care very little about Federal politics. They are endeavoring to develop the resources of the South and regain the broken-down fortunes left by the desolation of civil war. "So taking the past and the present as indices for the future, it is plain to see that a dissolution of the Solid South will cut at the very roots of all these wrangles between the North and the South[141] in which sectionalism is involved."[142] "The people of the South are beginning to learn that the true road to power is not through the White House, supported by a swarm of federal officials", said a Tennessee paper in March of 1880. "They are learning that solid wealth is power, and that wealth is attainable only by working up their cotton and wool into fabrics and their ores into metals."[143] The clear-headedness of the following extract from an editorial which appeared in the Columbia, S.C. Register, at the time the city was putting forth every energy to realize a desire for cotton mills, is unsurpassed: