Fifty years in Wall Street

by Henry Clews

The continued material prosperity of the South is one of the best signs of the times, and it has given a legitimate forward impulse to the whole country. This section of the United States is in its natural resources more favored than any other, and presumably will ultimately become the richest. That indeed is its natural destiny under the industrial and agricultural development which will come from the growth of population, the consequent increase in the supply of labor and the progress of education. Here, indeed, you have a splendid prospect where distance lends enchantment to the view, and in aiding, encouraging and stimulating this development, on good business principles, none will be able to render better service than you Southern bankers. Already the South is progressing in actual agricultural and industrial wealth from year to year, and day to day, at a rate that would have seemed fabulous not very long ago; and the banker shares with the farmer this rapidly increasing prosperity, especially if cotton is selling at more than thirteen cents a pound, or even at ten cents. It is, therefore, to the banker’s interest to co-operate with the farmer, for by so doing the benefit becomes mutual. You gentlemen, as Southern bankers, are favored by Providence in being where you have such a wide and splendid field for doing good to others on a safe and conservative basis, at the same time that you are building up the South, and doing good for yourselves in the time-honored business of banking.

While the South is increasing rapidly in actual and substantial wealth, it is a good sign that this wealth is not going into a few hands, but being widely distributed among all grades of the population. The city, the town, the village, the factory and the farm give equal and abundant evidence that all are sharing this boon of material prosperity, resulting from their own industry and the Southern country’s legitimate development. You have, figuratively speaking, only to tickle the soil with a hoe, and it smiles with a harvest.

The South produced last year crops and other raw products valued at two thousand millions of dollars, or four hundred and fifty millions more than all the United States, outside of the South produced in 1880; and last year also its manufactured products were valued at two thousand five hundred millions, or five times more than it manufactured in 1880. This is the right kind of expansion.

Last year, too, the increase in the assessed value of property in the South was eleven hundred millions, or three hundred and fifty millions more than the increase between 1890 and 1900. Contrast the increase of seven hundred and sixty millions in that ten-year period with the increase of over sixteen hundred millions in the last two years—1905 and 1906.

Such growth is as phenomenal as it is gratifying, not only to the people of the South but to the people of the whole United States, and it is not a forced but a natural growth. We see it most conspicuously in the development of its industries, for it has now two hundred and fifty millions invested in cotton mills, an amount exceeding the capital invested in cotton mills in all the United States in 1880. This alone is a grand exhibit.

The South also is making pig iron at the rate of three million five hundred thousand tons a year, more than all the rest of the country made in the year 1880, and the capacity of the South for iron and steel making is practically unlimited. Turning to bituminous coal, the South mined eighty-five million tons of it last year, and in the last fiscal year the foreign exports of all kinds from southern ports were valued at seven hundred and thirty-four millions against only about two hundred and fifty millions in 1881. The South may well be proud of all this productiveness.

So great is this material development and so great the consequent demand for transportation facilities, that every railway in the South may well need double tracking, while to keep pace with the South’s present rate of progress, thousands of miles of new railways will have to be constructed every year for many years to come. The South should therefore continue to encourage capital no less than immigration, on a scale extensive enough to meet all its legitimate requirements. This is the work, Gentlemen and Bankers of the South, that lies before you.

Now I come to Kentucky; good old Kentucky—with which is linked the fame of Daniel Boone, and a Civil War record of which it may well be proud.

We in the North, of course, all know that Kentucky is famous for its beautiful women, its handsome men, its splendid race horses of the great blue grass region, and the whiskey of which Colonel Watterson has told us so much and claims to be so fine a judge. His story of “Old Kentucky Bourbon” is a dream of eloquence.

But first of all to engage our attention are the women, whose beauty is only eclipsed by their charm of manner, their refinement and bright intelligence. They represent an aristocracy of the best blood of the American people, and I can testify to their fascinations, for I won, or rather surrendered to, one of the finest of Kentucky’s daughters, after for a long time supposing that my surrender was impossible even to the fairest of the fair; and therefore I am glad to come to Kentucky and to enjoy the privilege of addressing so many of its stalwart sons as are gathered in this distinguished assembly of Kentucky bankers, on the general situation, after the financial storm we have passed through. I indeed almost feel, in the tender words of the popular song, that I have at length reached “My Old Kentucky Home.”