per of the
South Atlantic States began to change. The people began to believe in
Southern industrial development and to be eager to invest their savings
in something other than a land mortgage. An instalment plan by which the
savings of the people, small individually but large in the aggregate,
were united, furnished capital for mills in scores of towns and
villages. In 1890 there were nearly a million and three-quarters
spindles in the South compared with less than six hundred thousand ten
years before.

It seemed as though nearly every mill was profitable, and the occasional
failures did not seriously check the movement, which developed about
1900 almost into a craze in some parts of the South. In these sections
every town talked of building one mill or more. The machine shops of the
North, which had been cold or at least indifferent to Southern
development, woke up, as Southern mills began to double or triple their
equipment out of their profits. Agents were sent to the South to
encourage the building of new mills, and to give advice and aid in
planning them. The new mill-owners were good customers. They had learned
wisdom by the mistakes of the pioneers, and they demanded the best
machinery with all the latest devices. Long credit was now freely
offered by Northern manufacturers of machinery, and some of them even
subscribed for stock--to be paid, of course, in machinery.

The Northern textile manufacturers also woke up. They found that in
coarse yarns the Southern mills were successfully competing with their
products. Some pessimistic representatives of the industry in the North
prophesied that the Southern mills would soon control the market. Some
New England mills built branch mills in the South; some turned to the
finer yarns; and some sought to throw obstacles in the way of their
competitors. It has been freely charged by many Southerners that New
England manufacturers bore the expense of labor organizers in an
unsuccessful attempt to unionize the Southern mill operatives. It has
also been charged that the propaganda for legislation restricting the
hours of labor and the age of operatives in Southern mills was financed
to some extent by New England manufacturers, and that the writers of
the many lurid accounts purporting to describe conditions in Southern
mills received pay from the same source.

The system of paying for stock on the instalment plan permitted the
construction of many mills for which capital