So how can you best attract immigration? By furnishing work for the artisan and mechanic if you meet the demand of your population for cheaper and essential manufactured articles. One-half million workers would be needed for this, and with their families would double the population of your State. In these mechanics and their dependents farmers would find a market for not only their staple crops but for the truck that they now despise to raise or sell, but is at least the cream of the farm. Worcester county, Mass., takes $720,000,000 of our material and turns out $87,000,000 of products every year, paying $20,000,000 in wages. The most prosperous section of this world is that known as the Middle States of this republic. With agriculture and manufacturers in the balance, and their shops and factories set amid rich and ample acres, the result is such deep and diffuse prosperity as no other section can show. Suppose those States had a monopoly of cotton and coal so disposed as to command the world’s markets and the treasury of the world’s timber, I suppose the mind is staggered in contemplating the majesty of the wealth and power they would attain. What have they that the South lacks?—and to her these things were added, and climate, ampler acres and rich soil. It is a curious fact that three-fourths of the population and manufacturing wealth of this country is comprised in a narrow strip between Iowa and Massachusetts, comprising less than one-sixth of our territory, and that this strip is distant from the source of raw materials on which its growth is based, of hard climate and in a large part of sterile soil. Much of this forced and unnatural development is due to slavery, which for a century fenced enterprise and capital out of the South. Mr. Thomas, who in the Lehigh Valley owned a furnace in 1845 that set that pattern for iron-making in America, had at that time bought mines and forest where Birmingham now stands. Slavery forced him away. He settled in Pennsylvania. I have wondered what would have happened if that one man had opened his iron mines in Alabama and set his furnaces there at that time. I know what is going to happen since he has been forced to come to Birmingham and put up two furnaces nearly forty years after his survey.