year’s interest would build factories to supply at cost every yard of bagging and every pound of guano the farmers need, establish her exchanges and their warehouses, and have left more than a million dollars for the improvement of their farms and their homes. And year after year this drain not only continues, but deepens. What will be the end? Ireland has found it. Her peasants in their mud cabins, sending every tithe of their earnings to deepen the purple luxury of London, where their landlords live, realize how poor is that country whose farms are owned in mortgage or fee simple by those who live beyond its borders. If every Irish landlord lived on his estate, bought of his tenants the product of their farms, and invested his rents in Irish industries, this Irish question that is the shame of the world would be settled without legislation or strife. Georgia can never go to Ireland’s degradation, but every Georgia farm put under mortgage to a foreign capitalist is a step in that direction, and every dollar sent out as interest leaves the State that much poorer. I do not blame the farmers. It is a miracle that out of their poverty they have done so well. I simply deplore the result, and ask you to note in the millions of acres that annually pass under mortgage to the money-lenders of the East, and in the thousands of independent country homes annually surrendered as hostages to their hands, another evidence of that centralization that is drinking up the life-blood of this broad Republic. Let us go one step further. All protest as to our industrial condition is met with the statement that America is startling the world with its growth and progress. Is this growth symmetrical—is this progress shared by every class? Let the tax-books of Georgia answer. This year, for the first time since 1860, our taxable wealth is equal to that with which, excluding our slaves, we entered the civil war—$368,000,000. There is cause for rejoicing in this wonderful growth from the ashes and desolation of twenty years ago, but the tax-books show that while the towns and cities are $60,000,000 richer than they were in 1860, the farmers are $50,000,000 poorer.