Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1881-12-13
THE NEW SOUTH's FUTURE.
The Cotton Exposition and Hts Les
sOns-An Interesting Letter from
Colonel A. X. Mcclure to the Phila-
deIphia 'tTImes.'s

deIphia 'tTImes."
The following are the more striking pass
ages of a very suggestive and readable let
ter which the Hon. A. K. Mcclure, editor
of the Philadelphia Times, wrote to his pa
per from Atlanta, under date of Novem-
Der 2S:
The Atlanta Exposition is to this city and
State what the Centennial Exposition was
to Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. By the
Centennial Exposition Philadelphia was
made the centre of Northern progress for
years to come, and Pennsylvania was quick
ened to the stride of more than 8 decade In
a single year. By the Cotton Exposition
Atlanta is made for more than generation
to come the centre. the fountain of the new
departure in the South. 1t is one of the
most beautiful inland cities on the conti-
nent, and its beauty has all the glow of
ruddy health and long endurance. 1t has
the quick impulses of the South conserved
by Northern capital and sagacity. Its peo-
pie live only In the present and for the
future. They have buried their dead; they
have forgotten the days of servile labor and
helpless mastery; they have learned that
work and thrift 90 hand In hand in the
sunny South as we'll as in the chilly N-ssn,
less advantages of climate and products
which were rejected by their fathers
for more than a century of slow decay.
Georgia has the ablest journals, the ablest
statesmen, the ablest business meu of any
State In the South, and her people have
been the earliest to learn that their destiny
is in their own hands, with boundless posi-
bilities. Her great men OF war times are,
as a rule, among the most liberal and pro-
gressive leaders of the whole South. Her
Stephens, Gordons, Browns, Hills, Col
quilts, Spears and others, who shared the
sad fortune of their section, were among
the first TO break the old Bourbon shell that
confined them to the fretful past, and the
new Atlanta is their work and their pride as
much as was Rome the pride Of her C@ sars
when all roads led to the capital.
THE EXPOSITION AND ITS LESSONS.
did not come to view the Atlanta Expo
sition as a great show. have seen the Cen
tennial, and that must make all like exhibit
tions pale before 1t until another centennial
of freedom shall come over the dreamless
sleep of all the living OF to-day. But
| have studied the grand Cotton Exposi-
tion now open in this city with absorbing
interest, as one of the first great monuments
which mark the progress Of the new South.
Il has brought the Southern people together
as they never met before. They have come,
not to commemorate their heroism in de-
fense Of, and their devotion to the Lost
Cause, but to commemorate their deliv
erance from a bondage Of races that
was mutual and to gather fresh inspiration
in the effort to elevate and advance their
position and promote their wealth and pres
perity. And with the hitherto unknown
concentration of the South, the people of
the North are here, in mutual interchange
of thought and energy and the Exposition
ie ba OF incg hot xUfI ba II
lum, the hands, the stroke of the great ma
chinery of progress. Even the South Is
amazed at the completeness of the Expo
sition, and the North is equally amazed at
the success of the new South in learning
what Northern people had to learn to enable
them to live. Sectional prejudices perish
as the Northerner and Southerner go hand
in hand to enjoy the beautiful panorama OF
Southern advancement.
The chief lessons of the Atlanta Exposi-
ton are eminentlV practical, and they are
so regarded by the Southern people. They
will give not only immediate but lasting
and incalculable fruits of the grandest char
acter. The Cotton Exposition will silence
the hum of many spindles in the North,
and it will make the South much more the
legitimate field for both invention and capt.
tai than it has ever been in the past. 1t will
teach to the great mass of the Southern pso-
pie what only the theorists have known
until now-that the greatest boon to the
South after the cotton gin is
the cotton spindle and l hazard
nothing in saying that in another
decade Georgia will spin all her cotton,
have looms for most OF 1t, and make the
music of the cotton factory heard IN every
cotton centre OF the South. OF all civiliZa-
tiOns of the nineteenth century, the Old
South was the only one that would have
paid more than two hundred millions
OF dollars annually to hated
North to spin its cotton. With
| the cost of a thousand miles of trans
portation; the cost of baling; the injury of
the fibre by pressing and separating it again
for the spindle, and the increased cost of
labor in the North, all pleading for the spin
die In the South, the North gathered the
chief profits of Southern products
by receiving the raw material and
returning it in web to be sold
| largely to those who should have made it.
But the new South has studied simple
arithmetic and its Cotton Exposition is
merely a huge blackboard on which is
presented to the whole South the plain
lesson that the three hundred millions worth
of cotton produced each year will be worth
three hundred millions more when the am
pie and iceless water powers of the South
shall be employed to whirl the merry spin
dies at home. This is the great lesson OF the
Atlanta Exposition, and the preliminary
progress that has made the grand Expo
sition possible has developed a measure
of invention and advancement In the
South that is truly wonderful. No
one can carefully note the cotton machin-
cry at the Exposition without accepting the
conviction that even the old cotton gin and
the old spindle will soon become internal
parts of the same cunning implement, and
that the raw cotton from the field sack will
be gInned andspun by single process. That
once attained, or even the spinning of the
cotton, with its two or three hundred mil
lions of annual compensation, assured to
the South, its progress will ouGstrip the
widest calculation, and every channel of
industry will share the impetus. 1t was q
hard uphill struggle even for Atlanta and
Georgia to lay the solid foundations for
Southern progress, but it has been done,
but the active men Of to-day will live to
rejoice in the enlightened advancement and
wealth and grandeur of the New South.