ing strength, as indicated by the number of national banks and other essential features, is compared below for a ten-year period:

From the standpoint of the number of national banks assenting, the Richmond district stands on a par with New York. Its 475 national banks have a capital and surplus of $105,064,000. That entitles it to a central reserve institution with an investment of $6,303,000, or nearly half as large as the capitalization of the Philadelphia institution and less than one-third that of the central bank of New York.

This district is the first in order from north to south to include agricultural operations of a different class from those common to the New England and the middle Atlantic states. Here banking enters the cotton territory. Approximately 4,500,000 acres of cotton belong to this south Atlantic banking zone. Its area of 173,000 square miles is larger than the combined area of the first three reserve districts. In population the total of 8,519,000 outranks all other districts, excepting only New York and Chicago.

District No. 5 is a particularly strong one in natural resources. Its large agricultural acreage is still expanding in two of the oldest farming industries-cotton and tobacco growing. These areas have in soil and seasonal conditions somewhat of a natural monopoly for the peculiar variety of crops, including early vegetable and fruit production. On the west lie the mineral resources of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. The forests of these states and the Carolinas, including hardwoods and pines, constitute primary sources of wealth insuring an extended future to the economic activities depending upon such supplies. It is not generally known that in furniture production the North Carolina towns lead all other sections of the country.

Among the natural advantages which give this district a high

place are the mineral resources of West Virginia. In 1912 the United States Geological Survey valued the total production of this state's mineral wealth at $123,872,000. Since 1906 the state has piped out into adjacent states 650,500,000,000 feet of gas out of 1,138,000,000,000 produced. The state's production of oil annually is 12,000,000 barrels and its coal output is 61,770,000 tons. Deposits of brown hematite iron ores estimated at 185,000,000 tons. Iron and steel manufactures for the state, including the northern point in the Cleveland district, are estimated at $40,000,000. In the Fairmount region alone 3,500,000,000 tons of Pittsburgh coal are available for coking purposes. The coal measures, embracing an area of 17,000 square miles, are estimated to contain 230,000,000,000

tons.

SIXTH DISTRICT-ATLANTA.

CHIEF DISTRIBUTING CENTER OF SOUTHEASTERN STATES SERVES AREA OF 233,000 SQUARE MILES, AND 372 BANKS.

Climatic Features and Natural Resources Grouped in Complemental Relation to Distribute Burden of Financial Requirements Through Successive Seasons-Purchasing Power of the Area is Enormous.

Atlanta district makes the fifth fronting on the Atlantic seaboard. Although one of the largest in total area, it is the smallest in the number of national banks included. District Number Six, with Atlanta as a center, comprises 233,000 square miles, and is the largest federal reserve region east of the Mississippi. The assenting institutions, numbering 372 national banks, have the smallest capital and surplus among the twelve, and likewise the smallest subscription to any regional reserve bank. The 6% quota will give the new institution a capital of $4,641,000, comparing with $6,303,000 for Richmond, and $5,520,000 for Dallas, in adjacent districts.

Some of the heaviest timbered forest lands in the East are to be found in the mountain sections of this group of states. In the northern portion of the district the Appalachian range reaches its highest elevation, and the hardwood forests found there constitute the source of many of the leading steams which flow east to the Atlantic, and south to the Gulf. Probably no other eastern district is better supplied with rivers along whose banks densely growing timbers abound. These streams likewise are the sources of hydro-electric power, whose development has gone far enough to show that in due time a new industrial order is destined to be built upon this basic feature.

Climatic advantages and favored conditions in the supply of food and raw materials strike a fortunate balance here between the shorter seasons of the North and the debilitating heat of tropical latitudes. The Atlanta district enjoys the longest coastline, with the exception of the Pacific coast region, and the largest number of harbors known to commerce. None of its business localities are more than four hundred miles from the seaboard. That is practically the distance between Atlanta and New Orleans. From Atlanta to Nash

ville, the leading distributing market is Tennessee, the distance is about two hundred miles, in a direct line. Southern Florida, in which Key West is the remotest point, is seven hundred miles from its regional banking center.

Between this last-named point, where cigar manufacturing has attained to large proportions as an industry, and the Cumberland Gap on the northern border, there is an unusually wide gamut of financial services. Through the fifteen or more harbors, the district has a foreign trade of $334,000,000 a year. Savannah, in the east, is the second or third largest cotton exporting port in the South, sharing the rank by turns with New Orleans.

From Florida ports on the Gulf, coal and phosphate are shipped in large quantities to foreign lands. Lumber and cotton and cottonseed products are handled largely through the Gulf ports of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Tropical fruits enter the country in immense quantities through Mobile and other ports. And New Orleans is the principal distributing point for Brazilian coffee over a great part of the Mississippi valley.

The cotton yield of these states, of which there are about 12,000,000 acres out of a total for the entire belt of 37,000,000, is conservatively estimated at $325,000,000, or five times that of the mineral wealth of these states in 1912. Pro-rating the mineral production of the four states and portions of the states, the total for the year mentioned, according to the United States Geological Survey, amounted to $67,000,000. The mining industry of Alabama alone in the last-named year was placed at $30,641,000.

The purchasing power of this district, as measured by the merchandise movements, is high. Sales of farm products during the summer and early winter months entail an enormous volume of distributive operations from the jobbing centers of the North and West, through the commercial towns and cities of these states. The mercantile demand for funds in this distribution reaches its height just before the final quarter of the calendar year, when the harvesting of the season is begun, and farming operations liquidate their loans.

Adequacy of banking resources depends much on whether the demands for accommodations are divided more or less evenly among succeeding quarters of the year or are concentrated upon the different kinds of enterprises within a comparatively short portion of the year. The Atlanta district was presumably planned with regard to the former demands on banking resources by its industries.

The seasonal use of funds here reaches its height in one section and begins to be liquidated before the burden of demand for cash and credit reaches the other section in the succession of agricultural

crops. Among the mining and manufacturing districts, including lumbering and the production of fertilizers, the burden usually falls upon the banks at the opposite side of the year from the time when the agricultural demands are at their widest and heaviest.

Atlanta district contains approximately 2000 banks, including national, state, savings and private banks, and loan and trust companies. Outside of the Federal reserve system in which 372 banks are included, there are nearly twice the number of banking institutions found in New England in this southeastern district. Banks in these states had loans and discounts on a given date, as reported by the Comptroller of the Currency, of $425,000,000, or one-fourth of all assets of this kind in the thirteen southern states.

The twenty-one national banks in six of the leading cities of the district compare as follows in the main features of their assets:

Much of the traffic of the Atlanta district follows gravity lines. This gives to the seaboard markets a financial importance in domestic trade and in exporting activity.

The financial operations attending this commerce do not always follow the lines of commercial transportation. Exports of cotton through Savannah and New Orleans, of coal through Pensacola and of lumber and phosphates through gulf and ocean ports are financed by originating centers through New York.

It is a characteristic of this region that much of its annual production in coal, timber and iron and steel as well as cotton seeks points of consumption outside of the district. Another feature is the large demand for foodstuffs and merchandise which the vast wealth created here makes on the manufacturing industries and the agricultural production of the north and the west.