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We cannot doubt the existence of genuine reconciliation now, since the calls that have so recently assembled our gallant boys from every State in our Union, and who, mingled together, have illustrated the common valor of Americans in arms against the Spanish hosts, and whose, acts of heroism are now recorded in never dying lines that shall commemorate the worth of North and South, and East and West, alike.
As pharmacists, rejoicing in the existence of a truly re-united county, we should recognize that we must ever stand ready to do our part should foemen ever invade our territory, standing true and firm though we should be isolated from all the nations of the earth; and, so, looking back over the days of the war between the States, I have endeavored to see if there were not some lessons to be learned from the adversities in which the Southern people found themselves in the matters that particularly relate to our profession. For, when a people is put in straits and when overwhelming necessities confront them, invention is stimulated, experiment prompted, and, out of their very helplessness, often, intelligence is aroused, and action follows, which evolves new and valuable accomplishments.
The Southern people prior to the war were almost exclusively an agricultural people. The broad acres of the South yearly whitened in fleecy cotton, or waved with yellow grain, or sent forth from their soil the cane and rice harvests, or pastured the flocks within their confines. At the beginning of the war, except at Richmond and a few of the more northerly cities, there were very few machinery plants, and the factories and foundries which produced articles of cotton, or wool, or brass, or iron or steel, were small in number and in the extent and variety of their productiveness. The splendid waters of the Carolinas and of Georgia that now mingle the music of their falling with the hum and whir of textile mills, wasted over their rocks as they ran to the sea by the cotton fields in the broad, alluvial valleys. Boats that ran up the Mississippi and Ohio were laden with the cotton and what of Texas and the sugar and syrup of Louisiana, or the imported products of the Gulf countries, and they returned freighted with coal and iron, and all the varied manufactured products of the North and East. Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia were dotted with granaries and tobacco barns, and sent their ‘cattle from a thousand hills’ into the markets of the country. Florida and Mississippi
