SOUTHERN STATES SINCE THE WAR.
Introduction: General Subjects of Inquiry.
[WASHINGTON-October 23.]
I PURPOSE, in a not too hurried tour of the Southern States, to give some account of their condition under the new social and political system introduced by the civil war. I shall endeavour to collect such notes of the progress of their cotton plantations, of the state of their labouring population and of their industrial enterprises, as may help the reader to a safe opinion of their means and prospects of development. It will no doubt also fall to me to give such information of their natural resources, railways, and other public works, as may tend to show to what extent they are fitted to become a profitable field of enlarged immigration, settlement, and foreign trade. It is a prevailing idea on both sides of the Atlantic that the Southern States are likely to make vast progress in the next ten or twenty years, and it must be matter of common interest to see, by a near though brief view, how far this idea is supported by their actual circumstances.
The production of cotton is the chief material interest in the Southern States. It is the supply of cotton wool they have yielded, and may be made to yield, which gives them so powerful a hold on the attention of the manufacturing interests of the world. But while I shall make close observation of the state and prospects of cotton culture in the South, I must guard this inquiry against all supposed intention of trying to affect the current price of cotton, or of making guesses at the crop of the coming year or the next. Such questions are discussed in a thousand quarters, and from every possible point of view, with a keenness and intelligence that no single individual could hope to rival. My inquiry will be one of a more general, though at the same time, perhaps, of a somewhat deeper and more permanent character. The desirable end is that the Southern