Such reserves would be a paying investment, not only in protection to many interests, but in dollars and cents to the Government. The importance to the Southern people of protecting the Southern mountain forests is obvious. These forests are the best defence against the floods which in the recent past have, during a single twelvemonth, destroyed property officially valued at nearly twice what it would cost to buy the Southern Appalachian Reserve. The maintenance of your Southern water powers is not less important than the prevention of floods, because if they are injured your manufacturing interests will suffer with them. The perpetuation of your forests, which have done so much for the South, should be one of the first objects of your public men. The two Senators from North Carolina have taken an honorable part in this movement. But I do not think that the people of North Carolina or of any other Southern State have quite grasped the importance of this movement to the commercial development and prosperity of the South. The position of honor in your parade to-day is held by the Confederate veterans. They by their deeds reflect credit upon their descendants and upon all Americans, both because they did their duty in war and because they did their duty in peace. Now if the young men, their sons, will not only prove that they possess the same power of fealty to an ideal, but will also show the efficiency in the ranks of industrial life that their fathers, the Confederate veterans, showed that they possessed in the ranks of war, the industrial future of this great and typically American Commonwealth is assured. The extraordinary development of industrialism during the last half century has been due to several causes, but above all to the revolution in the methods of transportation and communication; that is, to steam and to electricity, to the railroad and the telegraph. When this Government was founded commerce was carried on by essentially the same instruments that had been in use not only among civilized, but among barbarian, nations, ever since history dawned; that is, by wheeled vehicles drawn by animals, by pack trains, and by sailing ships and rowboats. On land this meant that commerce went in slow, cumbrous, and expensive fashion over highways open to all. Normally these highways could not compete with water transportation, if such was feasible between the connecting points.