Despite appearances, slave labor was expensive. If sick­ness and old age are added to the initial cost, accurate cost-accounting shows that slave labor was often more costly than free, besides usually being more inefficient. The margin of profit on cotton tended to grow smaller with the expanding cotton crop.

It was the fertility of the virgin soil, ruthlessly exploited, that brought the profits.

More than anything else, the increase over the years of the value of slaves fastened the system upon the South and convinced southerners of its value.

Land might wear out and decline in value, the price of cotton might be low as it was in the five years preceding the Civil War of 1861-65, but the value of slaves kept on climbing

Cotton seemed wholly suited to slave labor. Its culture is imple; few tools and little equipment are needed, and its cultivation extends over a large part of the year. Women and children can be employed as well as men.

The adaptability of cotton to slave labor, however, was not the only influence favorable to slavery. In one sense, slavery tends to perpetuate itself by eliminating competition. Free immigrants from Europe, in their desire to avoid com­petition with slave labor, largely avoided the agricultural South.

Slavery was also strengthened by the abundance of fresh land, which made it possible to waste the soil under a one-crop system with unskilled slave labor and then move on to ruin another’ piece of land in the same way

The geography of the Northeast did not fit well into this pattern and, with independence, the northern states broke away from it. But the South, with its rich soil and ideal climate found its wealth in agriculture with such crops as tobacco, rice and indigo.

Then in 1793, great new possibilities for the produc­tion of cotton appeared with the invention of the cotton gin, a machine that made it easy to separate the cotton fiber from the seeds. Cotton, a crop supremely suited for the South, needs about six months to grow and ripen, and this fitted perfectly into the region’s weather pattern.

Land was cheap and many farmers put all their energies into growing this single crop mainly with the help of slave labor.

At first this labor was supplied by the degrading slave trade from Africa. After the slave trade was abolished in 1808, the natural population increase of slaves continued to provide workers for the cotton fields.

Today, the Southeast is experiencing a surge of industrial development, although average income and standard of having remain lower than any other region of the nation. How­ever, economists predict that in the next decade the~ standard of living will rise substantially with the increase

In population, jobs and industry attracted by the relatively lower costs of land energy and labor. Industries ranging from solar research to chemical technology are moving to Southeast’

For example, creating blue- and write-collar jobs, and boosting incomes. Three-fourths of the Jobs created by this Ion as of population are in service-oriented businesses secondly restaurants, hotels, gas stations and TV.-repair shops Only four percent of southern workers remain employed by agriculture.

Yet the South’s extensive woodlands, lands and agrarian heritage give southerners a sense of tradition, history and regional Identification of goods as were available came to the New World from the mother country in exchange for raw materials.

And to delight the human sense of poetry and wonder, the Southeast has many landscapes of special beauty. For in­stance, there are low water-covered lands where cypress trees, shaped like long-necked wine bottles, rise out ofdark. quiet waters into dark, tent-like masses of vines above.

There is soil that looks like broad expanses of red silk decorated with the long curving rows of pink and whit~ flowers of the cotton plant. There are quiet little valleys hidden between great green hills; or sunny. sandy islands where all the world seems to be one endless stretch of sand, water. sky and wind.

Since the end of World War II. there has been a great upturn in the region’s economic fortunes. Persons returning to the Southeast after many years’ absence are astonished at the improvements they see: new roads, bridges and factories; new schools, hospitals and community centers..

The point of the story was expressed by a modern south­erner in this way: “We have added too little human skill to our raw materials.”

As this comment and the fable both suggest, geography itself has been kind to the Southeast. The region is blessed with plentiful rainfall and a mild climate. On most of its farmlands, crops can be grown without frost at least six months of the year.

A transportation artery, the Mississippi River and its southern branches, runs through the heart of the area, and other rivers are found near its coast. Crops grow easily in its soil, which is brown on the coastal plain, red on the low hillsides, and black in east Texas.

The mountain contributes coal, water power, and rich valleys. Much of the Florida peninsula is a garden for subtropical fruits. Solve of the nation’s large fields lie in the tates of Louisiana and Texas. The region IS naturally rich In fishiness, forests and minerals.

This southeastern region is changing more rapidly than any other part of the United States-not because the land is new, but because the area’s old, exhausted land is being given new life.

The problems of the Southeast area are best illustrated by a story that goes back a decade before the turn of the cen­tury. The tale describes the funeral ofa poor man. “They cut through solid marble to make his grave and yet the little marble tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet his pine coffin came from Ohio. They buried him beside an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel came from Pittsburgh.

They buried him in a coat from New York and shoes from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati. The South didn’t supply anything for that funeral except the body and the hole in the ground.”