The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-06-13
AGRICULTURAL.
SOUTHERN IMMIGRATION.

In an address last month before the
 American Cotton Manufacturers associa-
 ton, Mir. M V. Richards, head of the land
 and industrial department of the Southern
 railway, discussing immigration as
 means for recruiting the labor supplies of
 the south, said;
 My concern always has been and is
 now to see the right kind of start made:
 the rest is easy When things begin to
 come our way the tension Is relaxed, and
 presently things move along through sheer
 weight of their own momentum. If a
 factory is started at some point where in-
 dustry had hitherto Jagged, and 1t proves
 success, in ninety cases out of one hun
 dred 1t will find lmitators, and thus the
 procession is started. If a rural commun- ity receives an accession of foreign immi
 grants who prove to be successful, I cease
 to worry about that place, knowing there
 is a soliciting force at work with friends
 and relations back where they came from
 who may confidently be relied upon to come along, as they are able, and swell
 the number of agricultural workers so sorely needed.
 Tt Is the homemaking in the south
 now becoming apparent to the eye, vis- ible along the country highways and from the car windows of passing trains, that Is eXerting the strongest influence in set ting the south. and in the sediment of the rural district lies, to my mind, the solution of the labor problem for our tex tile mills. Now this is simply a reitera-
 ton of an old position in which am by
 no means alone. Settle up your farms. | cut your farms into smaller areas and 1 your labor problem in the mills will be
 quickly adjusted. Your mills will continue
 then formerly to draw their chief labor
 support from the farming districts. In l every city and town in the south there are plenty of men who could promote immi-
 grafton just as effectively and in substan- tially the same way that they have pro-
 noted industrial development. Every fam fly from outside, sufficiently and con tentedly placed, is so much capital in vested in your section; more valuable and potent than capital in the form of money 1 invested in factories which, of course, do not mean to depreciate.
 Men for Capital.
 Apparently many cities and towns ca- pable of raising large sums of money for local industries fail to realize the inter-
 dependence of town and country; they fail to realize that to insure prosperity
 for their towns their tributary country shall be promoted with equal energy and | skill. The capital required for country districts is men-working people. Some | of the overcrowded countries of Europe are filled with the right kind of people, anxious for an opportunity to start life | anew in this country, while all over the south, adjacent to busy cities and towns, are thousands of acres of idle lands, or. at best, lands only partially used, which would fit out enough people with homes to revolutioniZe conditions as much or more in the country as we have witnessed in the cities and towns since the inaugura- tion of the new industrial era Half a dozen farmers of the right sort are of as much value to a town as a small factory they are of more ultimate value If they
 are selected with reference to the influence
 they will have in bringing others in their
 wake.
 Large immigration movements come
 by graduations and through cumulative
 efforts. each successful immigrant being
 so much leverage on another. The ex-
 ception to this rule, with which we are
 all more or less familiar, and which has
 been practically brought to a final ter
 imitation through the exhaustion of the
 supply of public lands available for
 ontry-the rushing of masses into sec
 tions of the far west for homesteading-
 has generally brought more dsappoint-
 ment than success to the earlier par
 ticipants. Such methods are. of course. not practicable in the south even If they were desirable To my mind the feasible rational plan for the south 10 pursue is simply to stimulate the present prac- tice of locating small nuclei of settlers at as many points as possible, and let the leaven do it's work.
 No Monopoly of Virtues. eve hear a great deal about the | desirability of this race and the undesir- | ability of some other race in this dis- l cussion of immigration, and the appre- | hension Is frequently expressed that the | south is in danger of becoming the vic- | tim of invasion by menacing hordes of | foreigners. My own opinion is that no race of people has monopoly of all the virtues There are good and bad among all peoples, and 1t is at least singular | that the race from what the most Is I feared (the Italian) appears, as far as l his performance can be measured by 1 the criminal records of our large citiB. to have been the least dangerous and harmful element of our population. while elements of foreign population which we could greet without question have con- tributed in much larger proportion to the crime and disorder of the country. However, I am not here to advocate the merits and virtues of any particular race of people; I simply want to point out how easy, where communities differ on the question of race desirability, it is to put in practice a form of local option applied to immigration. In parts oi this state and in South Carolina the foundation stock is Scotch, and the opinion Is strongly held that this origi- nal element ought to be reinforced from Scotland. Nobody can quarrel with that idea"