the "Morrill" acts. The abominable system of store credit
kept the majority of farmers, black and white, in servitude, but was
giving way, partly to regular bank credit--a great improvement--and
partly to cash transactions.

[Illustration: Men tending trees.]
A grove of oranges and palmettoes near Ormond, Florida.

Florida came to the front as a lavish producer of tropical fruits.
Winter was rarely known there. If it paid a visit now and then the
State's sugar industry made up for the losses which frost inflicted upon
her orange crop. The rich South Carolina rice plantations bade fair to
be left behind by the new rice belt in Louisiana and Texas, a strip
averaging thirty miles in width and extending from the Mississippi to
beyond the Brazos, 400 miles. Improved methods of rice farming had
transformed this region, earlier almost a waste, into one of the most
productive areas in the country, attracting to it settlers from various
parts of the North and West, and even from Scandinavia. Dairying, fruit
and cattle-raising and market-gardening for northern markets, other new
lines of enterprise, created wealth for multitudes. King Cotton was not
dethroned to make way for these rivals, but increased his domain each
decade.

In 1880 the value of farm products at the South exceeded by more than
$200,000,000 that of the manufactured products there. In 1900 the case
was nearly reversed: manufactures outvaluing farm products by over
$190,000,000. During this decade the persons engaged in agriculture at
the South increased in number 36 per cent., but the wage-earners in
manufacturing multiplied more than four times as much, viz., 157 per
cent. Each of these rates at the South was larger than the corresponding
rate for the country. The same decade the capital which the South had
invested in manufacturing increased 348 per cent., that of the whole
United States only 252 per cent. The increase in manufactured products
value was for the South 220 per cent., for the whole country only 142
per cent. The increase in farm property value was for the South 92 per
cent., for the country only 67 per cent. The increase in farm products
value was for the South 92 per cent.; for the whole United States it was
greater, viz., 133 per cent.

Land at the South was boundlessly rich in unexploited resources. More
than half the country's standing timber grew there, much of it hard wood
and yellow pine. Quantities of phosphate rock, limestone, an