done in the South since the war than before, and for the most part the Negro has done it.  Great crops of cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, corn, and other staples have been raised and marketed; mines have been developed, railroads built, manufactories established, and hundreds of other industries opened and pushed in the new era of prosperity which has dawned in the South; and while the capital and brains for this have been furnished by the whites, and largely from the North, the manual labor has been done mainly by the blacks.  They have made the New South possible.  Take the single item of the cotton they have raised:  The twenty-one cotton crops from 1841 to 1861, raised by slave labor, amounted to 58,500,000 bales; the twenty-one cotton crops from 1865 to 1885, raised by free labor, amounted to 93,500,000 bales.  There was a gain, with free labor, of nearly 35,000,000 bales, worth $2,000,000,000, or about the full estimated value of all the slaves set free by the war.  These facts show the value of the Negro to the South simply as a common laborer.

But his importance as a factor in securing a National prosperity is much enhanced when we note his remarkable capacity for improvement.  Grant that the great bulk of these eight millions are still in a pitiable condition, poor, ignorant, sometimes vicious, the victims often of barbaric superstitions, living often in hovels rather than houses, without thrift or cleanliness, in crying need of kindly hands to help uplift them to a better life.  Yet, granting all this physical and moral destitution among them, it must be said that history gives no record of a race, stripped and stranded so completely as these freedmen were in 1865, that has shown such marvelous progress in a quarter of a century.  They have responded wonderfully to every effort made to elevate them, and have shown in themselves such versatility and vigor of intellect as give high promise for their future.

Their own advancement in material prosperity is an indication of this.  Never was there a people left in worse plight than they were at the close of the war.  In a country ravaged and denuded by a long and destructive conflict, themselves penniless, with none of the knowledge and training that would fit them for competition with shrewder and abler classes, there seemed small hope of their getting more than a bare livelihood.  But ambition, mother wit, and a rare aptitude for learning have helped them on till the gains they have made for themselves are quite astonishing.  Not long ago the New York Independent made extensive inquiries through the Southern States with regard to this matter, and the replies showed that the disposition to accumulate property was very strong among the colored people, and that industry and economy and forecast for this purpose were virtues rapidly developing among them.  A large proportion of them are owners of their own homes, the proportions differing widely in different localities, ranging from 10 per cent. in North Carolina, to 20 per cent. in Virginia, 50 and 60 per cent. in some parts of Georgia, and 75 per cent. in some parts of Florida.  A writer from Montgomery, Ala., even claimed 90 per cent. of home-owners among his acquaintances.