marshes and swamps. The rich soil and the moisture are good for
rice, but the region is so unhealthy and so hard to drain that
only small parts are inhabited.

Everywhere in the coastal plain this same belted character is
more or less evident. It has much to do with all sorts of
activities from farming to politics. On consulting the map
showing the cotton production of the United States in 1914, one
notices the two dark bands in the southeast. One of them,
extending from the northwestern part of South Carolina across
Georgia and Alabama, is due to the fertile soil of the Piedmont
region. The other, lying nearer the sea, begins in North Carolina
and extends well into Alabama before it swings around to the
northwest toward the area of heavy production along the
Mississippi. It is due to the fertile soil of that part of the
coastal plain known as the "cotton belt." Portions of it are
called the "black belt," not because of the colored population,
but because of the darkness of the soil. Since this land has
always been prosperous, it has regularly been conservative in
politics.

The Atlantic coastal plain is by no means the only part of the
United States where the fertility of the soil is the dominant
fact in the life of the people. Because of their rich soil the
prairies which extend from western Ohio to the Missouri River and
northward into Canada are fast becoming the most steadily
prosperous part of America. They owe their surpassing richness
largely to glaciation. We have already seen how the coming of the
ice-sheet benefited the regions on the borders of the old
Laurentian highland. This same benefit extended over practically