1900,

IX, 54-57.

U.S. Census, might be utilized at last. Capital was secured from the North and from abroad, and the South set upon the textile industry in good earnest. All along the "fall line" cotton mills were built with phenomenal rapidity, and the mountain. people were gathered in factory villages. They worked for low wages, for their standard of living was not high, and fuel, food, and shelter cost little. There was no prejudice against the employment of women and children and no demand for shorter hours or prohibition of night work. Little could be accomplished in the war decade, but between 1870 and 1880 great strides were made. South Carolina doubled the capacity of her mills and the value of her output; North Carolina and Georgia were not far behind. By 1880 sixteen thousand people found employment in the Southern cotton mills, and their product was nearly one fourth that of New England. It became apparent that the white laborers had profited more than the blacks from the edict of emancipation.

Stubbs, Sugar, 79-101.

Houston, Cotton, 113-128. Shelfer, Tobacco,

129-144.

Other latent resources were developed by Northern capital and Northern entrepreneurs. The coal and iron deposits of the Appalachian range were exploited with modern machinery. The phosphate beds of Florida and South Carolina and Tennessee were opened up, and the preparation of fertilizers became an important industry. The sandy levels of Florida were covered with fruit orchards. The bayou lands of Louisiana and Texas were drained and irrigated and converted into more profitable rice fields than those

Wastes,

102-112.

of South Carolina. The salt islands of the Gulf coast were Edmunds, made to furnish this necessity at far less cost than the wells Utilization of of Syracuse. Enterprising lumber merchants began to fell 162-176. trees untouched since De Soto's day. The pine barrens, Knapp, once cleared, made excellent cattle ranches, for the native Rice, grasses were green all the year round, and the beasts had no need of shelter. The wastes of the ante bellum period were now converted to marketable goods. Cotton seed was ground and pressed and transmuted into a dozen valuable U. S. Census, products, oils and cattle feed, fertilizers, cotton batting, 1900, X, 740-742. The very driftwood of the river bottoms was made to furnish turpentine and tar, lamp black and creosote, alcohol and acetic acid.

and paper.

Dewey, 415-429.

Taussig,

Tariff Hist. of the U.S., 230-250. Rept. of the Tariff Commission, 1882,

1681-1710.

CHAPTER IX

CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS

The Protective Policy

NOTWITHSTANDING reductions in excise and customs duties made immediately after the war, the national revenues increased from year to year, until in 1883 the Treasury reported a surplus of $145,600,000. This was the inevitable result of the growth in population and in the consequent demand for the commodities subject to tax. The receipts from customs duties on sugar, silks, woolens, and iron manufactures were rapidly augmenting, as also from the excises on liquors and manufactured tobacco.

The surplus revenue could not be applied to the redemption of the outstanding bills of credit for fear of giving umbrage to the Greenback party, nor to the extinction of the government bonds without curtailing the circulation of the national banks. Financiers recommended the farther reduction of Federal taxes, and this was seriously undertaken in 1883. The more obnoxious of the remaining excise taxes were repealed, e.g. those on matches, patent medicines, and perfumeries, savings bank deposits and bank checks, and the charges on chewing and smoking tobacco were reduced by half. This measure relieved the specified industries of a considerable burden and met with general approval; not so the attempt to reduce the customs duties. A Tariff Commission, appointed in 1882, submitted an elaborate report recommending general reductions of twenty and twenty-five per cent on raw materials and articles of necessary consumption. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives refused to inaugurate action, and the measure was

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