The age-herald., 1901-03-24

tural, you are now not the less fruitful in crops, but you have added all this. (Cheers.) You have increased your pro duction Of cotton, and have added an ln- crease in ten years of nearly 300 per cent. in the production of iron. You have pro- duced three-fourths of the cotton crop of the world and 1t has brought you since the war about eight billions of money to enrich your people. But as yet you are spinning in the South only per cent. of it. Why not, with the help we will give you in New England and the North, spin it all? (Cheers) Why not establish here cotton mills that shall send. not the crude agricultural product to other mar kets, but the manufactured product. (Cheers) Why not. while supplying six ty-five millions of people, reach out and take a part we have not had In the com n1erce of the world?" (Cheers.)
 
 The notable and distressing error of this paragraph of the Presidents speech Is that new industrial birth has been the legitimate consequence of a reVolu- tionary industrial reform in Alabama.
 Alabama has a beautiful history in in dustrial growth, social refinement and noble statecraft. This history had been in process of formation in its facts through fcrty years of peace. The facts upon which this noble history Is founded called for four years of defence in war The defence was bloody, heroic, sublime The failure of the defence, under provi- dence, was followed by seven years of revolution within our boundaries, the most loathsome, until Alabama, main- tained alone by Alabamians, began anew upon old lines the same lines which men who lived and planned In the earlier sea- son of peace had laid down.
 Let us who seek truth and ensue it know that Birmingham was not born of A1.uk -N,N ,NzI, ours for the first forty years of the life of Alabama. Birmingham was more of a promise in the future of the Alabama of 1880 than the town was recognized to be in the future of the Alabama that was here when the streets of the town were laid off under charter in 1870.
 New industrial birth never more surely went out from a percentage of prosperity and virtue of society than that industrial life which Alabama had already provided to be imparted to the mineral counties before the incubus of slavery had been lifted from her great wealth In original industrial life. When the State had accumulated something like s400, ,0O0,- 600 of market values, had opened fields from the virgin forest to create in their production an export commerce five times greater than the export commerce of the ancient city of Philadelphia, had built from boundary line to boundary line in numerable high schools and churcneS, had put upon her great rivers many pa- latiai steamers for carriage of trade and passengers, had built more than TOO miles of railroad to feed the steamboats, all this in forty years, then the State sent out a prophet, a mild-mannered Irishman, Michael Tuomey, to foretell her wealth in coal and iron, and when Tuomey had examined the hills and filed the testimo ny of the rocks in our State archives, the ardor of the new industrial birth spread abroad There was no lack of money or of purpose. Three lines of railroad, con- meeting the port of Mobile with the min eral region were promptly surveyed and construction begun. without q suspicion anywhere that the incubus of slavery would distress the industry of mining of coal and iron more than 1t had obstructed the felling of forests, the production of crops, the navigation of rivers, the splen- dor of society or the energies of states men and soldiers.
 The men who legislated to build the three lines of railroad under the incubus of slavery" were the identical individuals who built, under the new industrial birth" the same three lines and these