Within the borders of this fair land of Dixie the finest opportunities for investment and the richest fields for enterprise ever known in the Western Hemisphere are now open to all who wish to come and help us to make it blossom like the rose. A new development has already begun. Thirty years ago there was not a factory in South Carolina. To-day she is spinning and weaving more cotton than she raises and is second only to Massachusetts in the manufacture of cotton goods; and North Carolina and Georgia have made equal progress with South Carolina in this new idea of making the South not only the leader in agriculture, but also in converting our raw material into finished articles of commerce and trade, and thus saving to our section countless millions of wealth. In the mountains of south-western Virginia, south-eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, North Alabama, where the sunshine plays hide and seek with the shadows, and where many rivers are born, there is a beautiful valley six hundred miles in length and from one to thirty miles wide. Until a quarter of a century ago the principal product of that country was children. The people did not realize that the north rim of the valley was almost an unbroken vein of coal and that the South was an exhaustless bed of iron, and they placed but little value on the vast parks of timber where the ax had never gleamed, but now the dynamite has just begun to jar the silent hills and the forests have just begun to fall. Birmingham is making the sky of night red with the glare of her furnaces, and all the way up the valley to the new city of Roanoke new furnaces are being lighted and new industries are developing, and Huntsville, Decatur, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Johnson City and Bristol on the line, will soon be great manufacturing centers, where the pig iron and the logs of hardwood that are now being shipped away to be converted into finished articles will pass through our own mills and we will cease to be the fools we have been in the past, buying furniture made in foreign cities out of our own timber and all the implements of agriculture made out of our own iron. [Illustration: GENERAL GORDON. ]