Year: 1872

The Condition or the south.


In another part of to-day's HERALD will be
found an article of considerable exhaustive


ness on the present material condition of the


Southern States. While that unfortunate
section is working out the political question


tory to learn, on reliable authority. based on
close estimates and keen observation, that the
vital process of recuperation is being ad-
vanced much more rapidly. Intimately
woven, we may say entangled, with this story
is the warp of politics which divides its rotten
threads between a disheartening mental in
capacity to seize the true needs of the South
on the part of the rich whites, an era of
plunder by the carpetbaggers, and worst of
all, an insensate antagonism of races. The
gradual increase to its old ante-bellum stand
ard in the cultivation of the great Southern
staples is the true test of a set
tlement of things all over the
lately rebellous States. Cotton, sugar,
tobacco. and even rice, are once more
taking their places in wonted form in the
markets of the world. 1t must necessarily be
admitted that this pleasing result is greatly
due to what Darwinism has termed 'the
struggle for existence" and which can no
more be ignored or deferred than the neces-
sity of breathing. Obstinacy, founded on
false sentiment, false pride and bad tradition,
has done much to limit the extent of this
struggle at the South. 1t fortunately could
never be exactly regarded as ''Lost Cause
although the manner in which the late slave
holders bemoaned the new state of things led
thousands of democratic prophets of evil at
the North to lament as loudly as jeremiah
over what they called in pompous phrase the


spolitical enslavement and financial and
material ruin of the already war-impoverished
South The fact is that when bread and
butter, or their Southern equivalents-pig
meat, chicken potpie and corn bread-become
''Lost Cause there will be no one left to
mourn it. Whatever inequalities and fantastic
wrongdoings have cropped out in the sad
chapters of Southern political history in the
past seven years, the necessity for industry
has preserved it from worse It has settled
the question whether the negro would make as
free laborer as available an individual as
when slave, and has forced all other than an
affirmative answer out of the field. That the
South should regain every iota of its political
rights is certainly desirable but the moral of
mutual toleration, on free basis, of the white
and colored races is frankly admitted in poll
tics as it is in labor-at the polls as well as on
the plantation-that the millennium cannot
arrive To the naughty chevalier this is the
thing in his mind to be resisted with all sorts
of mulishness but as the colored race can
neither be killed off by the Ku
Klux nor obliterated by a sweeping
flourish of sophomore oratory, he had
better put his hand to the hoe, and cease, by
his Bourbonism, to make the carpet-bagger a
necessity to the negro, whose strong arms he
cannot exist without employing. The secret
Leagues of the blacks as well as the Ku Klux of
the hairbrained whites would then disappear
and both races be left to industry and peace.


The emigration to Texas is certainly an ex-
ample which might be followed out with great
advantage by the other States. The absurd
Chinese feeling, which throws difficulties in
the way of muscular emigrants from Europe
=: " from the North is unworthy of people of
such pratension ~ enlightenment as the South
ern whites. These men anu women would not
come as conquerors or as enemies, but as
brain and Drawn, and should be welcomed as
people of their own race who come to cast
their lot for good along with them.