"The characteristics of these people are ineffaceably impressed upon our civilization. Indeed they are as deeply grounded into the religious and social soil of North Carolina, as though they had taken root like the rhododendron under the rocks and in the fissures of our hills and mountains. The Scotch-Irish American, with gigantic strides, has at last sat himself down upon the loftiest pinnacle of our 19th century civilization. He has never yielded to oppression; he has never compounded with evil. These brave people, bringing hither the virtues of their fathers as well as their own, have given North Carolina its most luminous page. They made the earliest industry of the Cape Fear--the industry of colonization. It was an industry that sought to provide homes for the people, and to dignify labor and life in the midst of surroundings that taxed every resource of action, and the ultimate verge of human daring; an industry that employed the plainest instruments--the axe to hew down the forest, and the plow to turn the furrow. Their primitive sires in these early settlements did not control those powerful auxiliaries that now multiply the skill of man; nor did they enjoy the aristocracy of the recognized power of wealth. They cared nothing for mammonism, that some philosophical crank has defined to be a physical force that makes men invertebrates. Here was life with the struggle of pioneers; a struggle for place rather than for position; for homes rather than castles, that prepared the intellect for a higher development, and man for ultimate power. The victory of the axe and plow were the pre-ordained antecedents to the victory of the forum and pulpit, and the triumph over the crude obstructions of nature was the divine prophecy of undisciplined toil. Out of the ruggedness of such an epoch came forth a condition of virtue and integrity; of honest and honorable convictions; of sincere patriotism; of a race of men who looked to themselves only, and originated within this scant domain the literature of economic life. It was here that the domestic sentiment displayed its captivating charm. Nowhere on earth was there a more generous love for children, and whenever this attribute of the heart appears, the prophetic benediction of Christ, as childhood lay in His hallowed arms, is fulfilled. Here was social life, too, in its freedom, picturesqueness and animation, without demoralizing conditions. Away northward and southward, bays and rivers stretched their wedded waves, hills holding in their dead grasp the secrets of centuries; the ancient miracles of fire and water where chaos had been transfixed in its primeval heavings; all these were here subject to the mighty mastery that men should eventually exert, and side by side with humble homes, arose schools and churches--emblems of the power and purity of the people. Here the ambassadors of Christ were persuasive with tongue, fervent in spirit; they felt that their religion was more ancient than