The evening light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1881-1883, 1882-04-19
A MANUFACTURING SOUTH.

the increase and its protableneSs Is no longer an
open question Northern capitalists have satisfied
themselves that investments in cotton mills nearer
the cotton fields safe and proltaDle, ana many VI
tn taking steps to plant portion OF the'i sur
plus cash on Southern soil correspondent o, lre
Augusta (Ga Chron Gle, whiting from Lowell
| Mass, asserts that the large corporations theIe
which now make money would be a great deal more
proftab Bile if in the South and that one can see
better in the machine shops OF Lowell now iapiuiy
cotton mills multiplying in the South than at am
other point the amount OF machinery OF inns au
under contract appears to be without limit ans
machinery goes to factories IN 'Tsn'a, and
observation-disclosures, however, taking the leau'-
Galveston News.
The stretch of our vision takes in remote
national restropect and with that in full view
we don't like this prospective for the South.
The days of factories and protective tariffs
brought no happiness, or prosperity, or har-
mony to this country. Tariff protection be-
gan IN 1924 hand in hand with banking mon
opoies, hand in hand with manufacturing pri-
vileges, running into initiation to-day and run
ming into bankruptcy tomorrow, the three
harvesting gains out Of both. 1t is moderately
certain that this money thrift awaits manu-
featuring South. But the life of the factory
slave in England with which her great writers
of fiction have adorned her literature, is going
to be the life of the factory slave here. For
the South to be handed over to the factory
Lords is doom, not destiny. If it is better TO
have its little children in its factories than in
its public schools, their veins almost without
moisture at IS, their bodies shrivelled with age
at IS, people without intellectual develop
ment, dwsrfed by the pinching vice of pen
ury to be lorded over by repacious million
aires, all of whose being and endowments are
represented by unit and cabinet Of cyphers,
then let US congratulate our people upon all
this factory promise. tits in vain to pretend
that anything is going to change it. The his
tory of factory life repeats itself in all places
and at all times. The lordly wealth and import
ance of the Lawrences, and Yields, in New
England is the exact equivalent of the penury
and insignifcance Of the lives they have
sapped, the marrow of whose bones they have
spun into warp and wool and then minted, as
ingots. Has the child Of the factories OF New
England any advantage over that type of fac
tory life of Old England, borrowed by her
great masters of fiction whose genius could
not supply any exaggerated human misery
over that the reality afforded?
What the south wants is great aggregate
of human happiness and human progress,
which are the only wealth, and not great
aggregate of money or property in which civ
ilzations of thousands of years ago, with self
for their center, were as refined mockery as
this, and ensnared by like cause. When will
society cease to divide its communities into
two classes, one miserable from want and the
other from causing it. Why should we repeat
the tresome mockery Of building streets of
palaces in our great cities, to be owned by
few hundreds of aristocratic snobs, with their
hundred millions each, rapacious, heartless and
without any God but self, as money in excess
ever leaves men. Is any given city, COM
monwealth or country better off with a million
of wretched people than with quarter that
number of happy ones? Or is that aggregate
Indebtedness in any degree removed by an
excess in its assessment rolls of any given
number of hundreds of millions Of dollars ?
There have been 50 years of experimental
greed and grievance, houndering in fictitious
prosperity that followed the protective system of
1924. 1t has come down with alternating
commercial thrift and commercial disaster,
now imitation and next bankruptcy. Our
people have only been prosperous and happy
heretofore so far as they have been an agrcul-
tural and commercial people with the whole
world open to their enterprise and adventure.
Trade and commerce would have been better
through all this half century with free ships.
and the carrying trade Of half the world, than
with the vast monopolies of banking cor
poratons and protective tariffs, schemes to en-
rich the few by Legislative expedients which
brings no universal good-better in actual
wealth and prosperity and hundred times
better in exemption from evils that wrongs al
ways entail, and in the peace, dignity and
moral integrity Of both government and peo'
pie.
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