“Without entering into the statistical and prosaic relation of railroad names and technical details, it may be said Mr. Plant stands foremost as a developer, and that while honor is due him for the creation of so much wealth, for the integrity of his life, for the energy with which he has built up the country, yet it is as a public benefactor and as one who has contributed vastly to the possibility of such an Exposition being held in the South, that he will be spoken of to-morrow. When he came here, in 1854, he found the country wedded to a slave-labor system, which necessarily meant a purely agricultural condition, and under which it would be impossible to develop manufacturing and other corporative industries. Without having been connected in any way with the war or with the politics which preceded it or followed after it, yet he was the pioneer of that new business which the war made possible, and which marks the end of the old and the beginning of the new. His career is a remarkable example of what can be accomplished by untiring industry and indomitable will. The people of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama cheerfully acknowledge the great obligations under which they have been placed by the labors of this energetic and capable man. “In recent years he has made his home in New York City, spending each summer in Branford, Connecticut. He is a member of the Union League Club and of the New England Society of New York, a man of commanding appearance, genial of nature, dignified and courteous of manner, and as modest as he is competent. “Such a man needs no eulogy. His works speak for him. Such a people as those of the South need no incentive to recognize worth wherever they see it. Mr. Plant will be royally received to-morrow, and in the closing years of his life he may well rest satisfied that a people for whom he has done so much will not easily forget it, and that his name will be remembered as one of the men who have served their time and generation, and who deserve the laurel wreath of immortality. “Forty-one years of his eventful life have been spent in the South; and his great fortune has been made in the South. How many important volumes of history are crowded into those forty-one years! Within that period this man of affairs has seen four million slaves emancipated; he has witnessed the greatest war of modern times; he has practically witnessed the birth of those twin powers--steam and electricity--whose combined forces have created new conditions of life; he has been an eye-witness to the tearing down and the upbuilding of States and the adjustment of the American people to a new environment. And yet, amid all this kaleidoscopic change, this quiet business man has gone on adding to his fortune in peace and in panic, in storm and in sunshine, and his potential force in Southern development will be fittingly recognized and crowned to-morrow, in a day set apart among the great days of the Exposition in his honor.