The Banner-Democrat. [volume] (Lake Providence, East Carroll Parish, La.) 1892-current, 1892-08-13
WORKSHOP OF THE PLANET.

What the Great Mississippi Valley Is
Clearly Destined to BE.
One hundred years ago the pioneers
from England, the advance guard of the
great column of Anglo-Saxon migra-
ton, that has during the interval
marched to the Pacific, abolishing the
frontier and conquering the desert, de.
scended the western slopes of the Al
leghanies into the valley of the Ohio
and disappeared in its solitudes. Chi
cago, Cincinnati and st. Louis were
outposts of civilization, exposed to the
brand and the .omahawk. A few log
huts, trading stations and mission
houses were scattered along the crum,
bling banks of the rivers and in the
profound depths of the forests. There
were neither highways nor public con-
veyances; commerce, agriculture, nor
manufactures; no schools, churches,
nor society; nothing but nature and its
vicissi.udes, the savage and his prey.
From that unsurveyed wilderness, in
less than century, twenty-one states
have been admitted into, the union,
having an area of eight hundred mil
lion acres, population of more than
thirty-five million, and wealth beyond
measurement or computation. Sparse
" inhabited. with rude and unscientific
methods, its resources hardly touched,
the states of the Mississippi valley last
year produced more than three-quar.
tiers of the sugar, coal, corn, iron, oats,
wheat, cotton, tobacco, lead, hay, lum-
Der, wool, pork, beef, horses and mules
of the entire country, together. with a
large fraction of its gold and silver.
Their International commerce is al
ready greater than all the foreign COM
merce of the combined nations of the
earth.
China supports four hundred million
people upon an area smaller and less
fertile. The civilization of Egypt,
whose monuments have for forty cen.
turtles excited the awe and admiration
Of mankind. was nourished by the cul-
tivation of less than ten thousand
square miles in the narrow valley and
delta of the Nile. The delta of the
Rhine and the adjacent lands reclaimed
from the Zuyder Zee, less than fifteen
thousand square miles, has long sus-
tanned the United Kingdom of the
Netherlands. and given to dense pop
ulation wealth, comfort and content
ment. The delta of the Mississippi, be.
low its junction with the Ohio, richer
than the Nile or the Rhine, exceeds the
combined area of Holland and Egypt,
and is destined under the stimulus OF
free labor and the incentives of self
government to build fabric Of society
more opulent and enduring.
Add to this the inexhaustible alluvior
of the streams above and the fertile
prairies from which they descend, and
the arithmetic of the past has nc
logarithms with which to compute the
problems of the economic and CONNER
cial future of the west. 1t will be pre-
dominant in the development, not o.
this country alone, hut of the hemis
phere, and will give direction to the
destinies of the human race. When its
agricultural, mining and manufactnr
| ing resources are fully developed by
steam and electricity the Mississippi
valley will support and enrich, without
crowding, five hundred million people
and be not only the granary but the
Workshop of the planet--Ex Senator
Ingalls,, in Lippincott.