Look away! Look away!
And live and die for Dixie,
Look away! Look away!
Look away down South in Dixie.”
Within the borders of this fair land of Dixie the finest opportunities for investment and the richest fields for enterprise ever known in the Western Hemisphere are now open to all who wish to come and help us to make it blossom like the rose. A new development has already begun. Thirty years ago there was not a factory in South Carolina. To-day she is spinning and weaving more cotton than she raises and is second only to Massachusetts in the manufacture of cotton goods; and North Carolina and Georgia have made equal progress with South Carolina in this new idea of making the South not only the leader in agriculture, but also in converting our raw material into finished articles of commerce and trade, and thus saving to our section countless millions of wealth. In the mountains of south-western Virginia, south-eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, North Alabama, where the sunshine plays hide and seek with the shadows, and where many rivers are born, there is a beautiful valley six hundred miles in length and from one to thirty miles wide. Until a quarter of a century ago the principal product of that country was children. The people did not realize that the north rim of the valley was almost an unbroken vein of coal and that the South was an exhaustless bed of iron, and they placed but little value on the vast parks of timber where the ax had never gleamed, but now the dynamite has just begun to jar the silent hills and the forests have just begun to fall. Birmingham is making the sky of night red with the glare of her furnaces, and all the way up the valley to the new city of Roanoke new furnaces are being lighted and new industries are developing, and Huntsville, Decatur, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Johnson City and Bristol on the line, will soon be great manufacturing centers, where the pig iron and the logs of hardwood that are now being shipped away to be converted into finished articles will pass through our own mills and we will cease to be the fools we have been in the past, buying furniture made in foreign cities out of our own timber and all the implements of agriculture made out of our own iron.
GENERAL GORDON.
Until twenty years ago the sons of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas were contented to sit on their verandas and watch the “nigger” and his lazy mule in the cotton field and listen to the melodies of the old plantation. But now the mills of Mississippi are beginning to mingle their music with these melodies, and the marshes of Louisiana are being converted into rice fields and she is making enough sugar to-day to sweeten the tooth of the world. Arkansas is building factories and opening her mines and mineral wealth, and sawing down her great forests of pine. At the close of the Civil War Texas was a wilderness, but now the howl of the wolf has given place to the whistle of the engine, and the whoop of the Indian has been hushed by the music of machinery. From Texarkana to El Paso prosperous cities and towns have sprung up like prairie flowers where the wild horse once galloped and the buffalo grazed, and great geysers of coal oil have solved the fuel problem.
In the full development of this new idea of transforming our raw material into finished goods lies our hope of regaining our prestige and power in the management of national affairs, and of winning back billions of wealth which were wiped out by the destroying angel of war. God grant that our beloved old South may be as happy in reaping the golden harvest of prosperity in the years to come as she has been brave and true through the suffering and woes of adversity in the sorrowful years of the past.
And now, my grizzled old friends who once wore the gray, in the name of the young men I congratulate you upon having lived to see the dawn of a brighter day for your battle-scarred and war-swept country. You must soon answer to the roll call of eternity and join your comrades on the other side. I give you the pledge of your sons that they will ever defend the record you have made and themselves live up to the traditions of their fathers. In the name of our women, both young and old, I implore the blessing of the Lord upon you, and pray that as the dews of life’s evening are condensing on your brow and the shadows of the long, long night are gathering about you, you may linger long in the twilight, with loving hands to lead you and loving hearts to bless.