Who produced this wealth? In 1865, when our towns and cities were paralyzed, when not a mine or quarry was open, hardly a mill or a factory running; when we had neither money or credit, it was the farmers’ cotton that started the mills of industry and of trade. Since that desolate year, when, urging his horse down the furrow, plowing through fields on which he had staggered amid the storm of battle, he began the rehabilitation of Georgia with no friend near him save nature that smiled at his kindly touch, and God that sent him the message of cheer through the rustling leaves, he has dug from the soil of Georgia more than $1,000,000,000 worth of product. From this mighty resource great cities have been builded and countless fortunes amassed—but amid all the splendor he has remained the hewer of wood and the drawer of water. He had made the cities $60,000,000 richer than they were when the war began, and he finds himself, in the sweat of whose brow this miracle was wrought, $50,000,000 poorer than he then was. Perhaps not a farmer in this audience knew this fact—but I doubt if there is one in the audience who has not felt in his daily life the disadvantage that in twenty short years has brought about this stupendous difference. Let the figures speak for themselves. The farmer—the first figure to stumble amid the desolate dawn of our new life and to salute the coming day—hurrying to market with the harvest of his hasty planting that Georgia might once more enter the lists of the living States and buy the wherewithal to still her wants and clothe her nakedness—always apparently the master of the situation, has he not been really its slave, when he finds himself at the end of twenty hard and faithful years $110,000,000 out of balance?