ief
industrial drawback consists in railroad freight rates unmodified by
water competition. She has, to be sure, a number of factories, including
a Ford automobile plant, but she has not so many factories as her
strategic position, stated by General Sherman, would seem to justify, or
as her own industrial ambitions cause her to desire. For does not every
progressive American city yearn to bristle with factory chimneys, even
as a summer resort folder bristles with exclamation points? And is not
soot a measure of success?

Atlanta's line of business is largely office business; many great
corporations have their headquarters or their general southern branches
in the city; one of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks is there, and there
are many strong banks. Indeed, I suppose Atlanta has more bankers, in
proportion to her population, than any other city in the United States.
Some of these bankers are active citizens and permanent residents of the
city; others have given up banking for the time being and are in
temporary residence at the Federal Penitentiary.

The character of commerce carried on, naturally brings to Atlanta large
numbers of prosperous and able men--corporation officials, branch
managers, manufacturers' agents, and the like--who, with their families,
give Atlanta a somewhat individual social flavor. This class of
population also accounts for the fact that the enterprisingness so
characteristic of Atlanta is not the mere rough, ebullient spirit of "go
to it!" to be found in so many hustling cities of the Middle West and
West, but is, oftentimes, an informed and cultivated kind of
enterprisingness, which causes Atlanta not only to "do things," but to
do things showing vision, and, furthermore, to do them with an "air."

This is illustrated in various ways. It is shown, for example, in
Atlanta's principal hotels, which are not small-town hotels, or
good-enough hotels, but would do credit to any city, however great. The
office buildings are city office buildings, and in the downtown section
they are sufficiently numerous to look very much at home, instead of
appearing a little bit exotic, self-conscious, and lonesome, as new
skyscrapers do in so many cities of Atlanta's size. Even the smoke with
which the skyscrapers are streaked is city smoke. Chicago herself could
hardly produce smoke of more metropolitan texture--certainly not on the
Lake Front, where the Illinois Central trains send up their black
clouds; for