d gypsum
were to be dug, also salt, aluminum, mica, topaz, and gold. Especially
in Texas, petroleum sought release from vast underground reservoirs. The
farmer did not lack for rain, the manufacturer for water-power, or the
merchant for water transportation to keep down railroad rates.

The white Southerner, of purest Saxon-Norman blood, had the vigorous and
comely physique of that race. Nowhere else in the land were the
generality of white men and women so fine-looking. Easy circumstances
had enabled them to become gracious as well, with the dignified and
pleasing manners characterizing Southern society before the Civil War.
High intelligence was another racial trait. The administration of the
various Industrial Expositions named in this chapter required and
evinced business ability of the highest order. During the quarter
century succeeding reconstruction popular education developed even more
astonishingly at the South than in the North or the West. Nothing could
surpass the avidity with which young Southern men and women sought and
utilized intellectual opportunities.

With few exceptions Southerners had become intensely loyal to the
national ideal, faithfully abiding the arbitrament of the war, which
alone, to their mind--but at any rate, finally and forever--overthrew
the old doctrine that the Union was a compact among States, with liberty
to each to secede at will.

Straightforwardness and intensity of purpose marked the Southern temper.
If a county or a city voted "dry," practically all the whites aided to
see the mandate enforced. The liquor traffic was thus regulated more
stringently and prohibited more widely and effectively at the South than
in any other part of the country. Even the lynchings occurring from time
to time in some quarters, while atrocious and frowned upon by the best
people, seemed due in most cases less to disregard for the spirit of the
law than to distrust of legal methods and machinery. Indications
multiplied, moreover, that this damning blot on Southern civilization
would ere long disappear.

The most aggravating and insoluble perplexity which tormented the
Southern people lay in dealing with the colored race. Sections of the
so-called black belts still weltered in unthrift and decay, as in the
darkest reconstruction days. These belts were three in number. The
first, about a hundred miles wide, reached from Virginia and the
Carolinas through the Gulf States to the watershed of the Sta