The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-10-17

uiliOil anu ldSl dS DRHlIlDB.
 Judge Walker of New York. the official starter of the races, said yesterday:
 
 little valleys which the rocky hills grant, ed erudgingly to the angry farmers are sweet oases, and the rocks themselves, fighting back man in his efforts to wiring reluctant subsistence in the imagination of the wanderer, becomes pregnant with beauty and bursting with the good har- vest. The land refused food to the real possessor except with coaxng and urging and diligence becomes a land of easy life to the absent, overflowing with milk and honey.
 'No country is so bleak and so barren and so profitless that it does not seem beautiful to it's late children, who sees 1t afterwards in their minds eye throuL- the mists of time and distance. They may not have occasion more truly to boast of the prowess of its sons and 1 tine virtues of its daughters than of the beauty of it's freezing climate or the productiveness of it's unresponding acres and yet they love it and make of this sterile and stubborn country a continued beast. The high points in the history of the old state may not be higher than the low points in tine state of their adop- tion and they never discover it. Their lcNIIlN TOT the Old nome or tnelr youth; the companions of their youth: for the big man whom they knew or read about in their youth wakes ever present and continuous joy and aspiration. No home land is so drear that 1t does not lie out beautifully to the wanderers soul; no peo- pie so insignificant and no history so bare of worthy incidents that the same wanderer does not hold them and it in aD everlasting and beautiful remembrance and love.
 But the country to which you re- turn, my friends, is not one of bare hills of unfrutful hills, or unlovely streams. The hills of your youth did not grudg- ingly yield slips of slim and lean earth for the plowman. It gave freely wide expanse of fallow earth. which laughed with pleasure and delight at your touch. If you fretted it at all 1t filled your barns and made your tables to groan. To no stroke of the hoe or touch of the ploy was it unresponsve. Besides being fruit full of the more solid comfort of life. the flowers rioted in the warm earth and cov- cred hill and dale with a wilderness of color which no artists brush has. or may copy; it's fault hung tempting from the orchard of every old farm when we grew to manhood in the other time
 While you may not know it then, our hills held mineral riches unequalled, and nature had been so kind as to plant to- gether in most loving association all the minerals necessary to make perfect steel and in quantities to armor all the ships of commerce for all the seas. link ali the states together in hundred steel bands and build thousand cities. Per haps you did not know they were here in the olden time and they may therefore. speak to you in a new tongue. These riches of the hills, new children of the state, so to speak, join in the voices of inc nrO1nCtG <ppw and hid Not1 nya1- come to Alabama.
 'If men, wanderers from sterile and stubborn soil. from a land where the icicles chill not only the unfruitful earth. but the blood of the people can look back upon 1t in after years and from dis tance and people 1t with the beauty of fruit and flowers. of plenty and warmth, what riot of imagination must have visit ed you in the years gone by when you re- called the prodigality of the unstinting earth of your old home. the warmth and geniality of climate and not to be un- equalled
 "The present year has not been as prodi- gal as the one that went before. and yet we are prosperous in Alabama, and counting several years together we have not known the equal of this period since the war. Our cotton farmers have not received for their toll a wage equal to that which those who live and labor Tn the corn anu WHedI sections, or equal to that those receive who live and work in the iron and steel. These cotton farmers of the south bear an unfair share of the governmental burdens. Last year they contributed, with 20 per cent of the popu- lation, 32 per cent of all the imports from seaports and every dollar of such imports was earned by working two hours where the wheat man and the corn man and the iron man worked only one hour.
 "When the world learns, and the cotton producer learns that 15 cents is not a high price for cotton, and that even 20 cents is hardly above dollar wheat, then will the cotton belt come around to it's own. Add to this the privilege of free trade, saving to us the millions which now go to pension hundreds of persons many of whom never heard the explosion of a cartridge, and we will at once un- disputedly be the richest section of the whole country.
 You will miss some of your old friends at the Home Coming. They have listened to the last call. Some of you were no doubt, of the mortal band which marched away in the eos to die in the deadly as- sault; on the field of battle afterwards, with the stars, of living things, their only company, were in the hospital far away from the ministering hands of the home angels 1t must fill you Home Corners on this day with proud emotion to recall that your state out of a popu- lation of 526.000 in 1860, sent away of the flower of her youth and manhood a hun dred and twenty-two thousand soldiers.
 Many of your comrades who fought