My countrymen, we thought the war a great calamity, and so it was. The destruction of life and of property was sad beyond expression; and yet we can see now that God led us through that Red Sea to a development in material prosperity and to a fraternity that was not otherwise possible. [Cheers.] The industries that have called to your midst so many toiling men are always and everywhere the concomitants of freedom. Out of all this freedom from the incubus of slavery the South has found a new industrial birth. Once almost wholly agricultural, you are now not the less fruitful in crops, but you have added all this. [Cheers.] You have increased your production of cotton, and have added an increase in ten years of nearly 300 per cent. in the production of iron. You have produced three-fourths of the cotton crop of the world, and it has brought you since the war about $8,000,000,000 of money to enrich your people. But as yet you are spinning in the South only 8 per cent, of it. Why not, with the help we will give you in New England and the North, spin it all? [Cheers.] Why not establish here cotton mills that shall send, not the crude agricultural product to other markets, but the manufactured product? [Cheers.] Why not, while supplying 65,000,000 of people, reach out and take a part we have not had in the commerce of the world? [Cheers.] I believe we are to see now a renaissance in American prosperity and in the up-building again of our American merchant marine. [Cheers.] I believe that these Southern ports that so favorably look out with invitations to the States of Central and South America shall yet see our fleets carrying the American flag and the products of Alabama to the markets of South America. [Great cheering.]