According to the "Financial Chronicle," there were in the Southern States named, in the cotton year 1888-89, two hundred and fifty-nine factories, averaging a little over five thousand spindles each, giving a total number of one million three hundred and forty-four thousand five hundred and seventy-six spindles in operation, with thirty-one thousand four hundred and thirty-five looms. The number of yarn spun was a fraction under No. 14 a gain in the fineness of the yarn, since my computation of 1880, of one number only.
If we deduct the few large mills, the average of the greater number is about four thousand spindles, ranging from one to six or seven thousand. The Southern consumption of cotton had increased from one hundred and eighty-eight thousand seven hundred and forty-eight bales in 1879-80 to four hundred and eighty-six thousand six hundred and three bales in the last cotton year. In addition to the spindles in operation, a few have been added, and it is estimated by the "Financial Chronicle" that, on the 1st of September of the present year, there were one million four hundred and fifty thousand spindles in the Southern States, of which about one million are in the States of North and South Carolina and Georgia. The list given in the Baltimore "Manufacturers' Record" gives a greater number, but many mills in that list are only projected. I therefore adhere to the carefully prepared statistics of the "Financial Chronicle."
It is on the Piedmont plateau that you are to look for competition if anywhere in the Southern country. The mills will be built upon the foot-hills of the Appalachian chain; in the uplands rather than upon the lowlands of the South. On the foregoing statement there has therefore been a gain in the twenty years that have elapsed since 1869 in Southern spindles, mainly in the last ten years, of about eleven hundred thousand spindles; certainly very rapid progress. But now let us look at the other side.
The gain in the population of these same States since 1870, on the basis of an estimate of our present population made by the Actuary of the Treasury Department, has been six million six hundred thousand. At the ratio of five persons to a spindle this absolute increase in the population of these same Southern States has called for the product of one million three hundred and twenty thousand spindles, or two hundred and twenty thousand in excess of the actual gain in the Southern factories. At the ratio of four and a half persons to a spindle, which is the present average, the gain in the population in these States requires the product of fourteen hundred and sixty thousand spindles. In these computations no cognizance is taken of the displacement of homespun fabrics.
If my computation is correct, that three and a half million
