The Mena weekly star., 1921-11-24
Rv St. Elmo Messengale.

By St. Elmo Messengale,
 Up to a few years ago capital was not sought in or did it hurry to the South. Dixie was considered as a pretty section of the country about which one should--and often did write songs, novels and dramas main ly remarkable for an impossible negro dialect and the number of roses that intruded upon every scene and set ting.
 Cash, as the country considered it's use in Dixie, was petty contrivance used strictly as medium of exchange and not as power of development. With blind allegiance the South clung to cotton as its great and only staple and the shifting market on that single staple spelled relative poverty of affluence for the territory south of Mason Dixon.
 A change has come to Dixie. It still has it's roses and it's negro population but added to that has come great outpouring of industrial blood thru the veins of southern progress and in instant response the south ahs de- veloped until from weak and pretty sister in cotton gown 1t stands to- day an industrial power to be reckon ed with in the offices of the worlds greatest banking, transportation, de- velopment and commercial units.
 Figures may weary the average reader, but beneath them lies TO- nance greater than any fictionist ever drew with swift running pen if one has but the ability to see and understand understand. Of the entire output or the United States in corn the South gives 54h per cent, of tobacco S4 z 10, potato 92 per cent,peanut 99 9-10, apple 16 e-l0, rice S5 per cent and sorghum syrup S5 per cent. The annual peach crop is nearly S44,000,000, sugar cane syrup S90,000, GOO, oats $175,000,000, wheat $500, 100000, and cotton S2,000,000,000 with a live stock value in the South of S2,500,000.
 The South's development as an ag- ricultural, dairy and live stock country is due to one cause more than all others. Advertising was the force that changed the South from a one-crop to a varied-crop and live stock section. It was not until the Southern newspaper and farm paper gave publicity to benefits to be deri-- ed from varied crops and live stock raising that Southern farmers could be induced to dethrone King Cotton." 1t took years of continuous advertis- ing on the part of these far-seeing Southern publications to sell the Southern farmers the idea that prosperity depended not upon one kind of a crop, but upon many kinds of crops.
 Papers Repaid
 While the Southern newspaper and farm paper publications were never directly paid for such advertising, the resultant prosperity of the South has repaid them many fold for the space so generously donated for the up- building of the Southern states agri- cultural interests.
 But advertising has been not only the means of building up the South agriculturally. 1t has built up the South industriously from practically a minus quantity, so far as manufactur- ing industries were concerned, to q point where Southern industries rival the industries of the other sections of our country.
 1t was only quarter of a century or so ago when Southern people had to obtain even the simplest of manu- factured commodities from the North. It was this condition which inspired the late Henry W. Grady. the beloved publicisf of the South, to write in one of his editorials, as follows:
 esit was a one-galloused fellow, whose brooches struck him underneath his armpits and hit him al the other end about the knees. He did not be- lieve in decollete clothes. They bur jed him in the midst of marble quarry. They cut thru solid marble to make his grave and yet, the little tombstone that they placed above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest and yet, he pine coffin was imported from Gin ,innati. They buried him within ouch of an iron mine and yet. the lails of the coffin and the iron in the hofel that dug bis grave were im- 'orted from Pittsburgh.
 sThey buried nim beside Che best i heep-ralsing country on the face of he earth and yet, the wool in the I siiln bands themselves came from the { scEth. ghs South did not furnish a q