Page:The cotton kingdom (Volume 2).djvu/305

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operation leading to the same sure results everywhere. Some carefully compiled statistics of the seaboard district of Georgia will be found in Appendix (D), showing the comparative condition of the people in the rich sea-island counties, and those in their rear, the latter consisting in large proportion of poor or worn-out lands. I recapitulate here the more exact of these statistics:—

Population.—A large majority of the whole white population resides within the barren counties, of which the slave population is less than one-fourteenth that of the aggregate slave population of the whole.

Wealth.—The personal estate of the whites of these upper counties is, on an average, less than one-sixth that of the others.

Education.—As the wealthy are independent of public schools, the means of education are scarcely more available for those who are not rich in one than the other, the school-houses being, on an average, ten and a half miles apart in the less populous, thirteen and three-quarters miles apart in the more populous.

Religion.—It is widely otherwise as to churches. In the planting counties, there is a house of worship for every twenty-nine white families; in the poor white counties, one for every one hundred and sixty-two white families. Notwithstanding the fact, that to accommodate all, the latter should be six times as large, their average value is less than one-tenth that of the others; the one being eight hundred and ninety-eight dollars, the other eighty-nine dollars.

Commerce.—So wholly do the planters, in whose hands is the wealth, depend on their factors for direct supplies from without, the capital invested in trade, in the coast counties, is but thirty-seven and a half cents to each inhabitant, and in the upper counties it is but one dollar and fifty cents. From