SECRET OF MATERIAL PROSPERITY. 255 



which has brought us to our present position can alone sustain 

 us and carry us througli. We may think it is economy to stop 

 our public works, we may think it is prudence to suspend our 

 public enterprise, but it seems to me hardly prudent or economi- 

 cal to curtail our resources when most needed, or to cast doubt 

 upon our capacity to meet our liabilities when a well-established 

 credit is of the utmost importance. 



It must have become apparent that the secret of our material 

 prosperity lies in the constant encouragement which has been 

 offered to that portion of the capital of our Commonwealth, the 

 product of our labor both intellectual and physical, which is 

 engaged in active, vigorous business — that capital which not 

 only constitutes the strength of trade, but which also passes 

 rapidly through the channels of business and supports the credit 

 of the community. It is this which constitutes our real wealth. 

 It is this which has filled our valleys with woollen and cotton 

 mills, with mechanical industry of every description, pouring 

 into the market every conceivable article of necessity and lux- 

 ury, and peopling the Commonwealth with a thriving popula- 

 tion, whose taste in ornamenting their estates and whose liber- 

 ality and good deportment are a constant source of admiration. 

 Add to these the farmers of our Commonwealth, whose lands 

 have been largely increased in value by the enterprise to which 

 I have alluded, whose products now find ready sale in a neigh- 

 boring market, and whose farms everywhere bear the marks of 

 growing prosperity, and you have a population requiring only 

 continued activity to enable them to relieve themselves from all 

 existing burdens, and an amount of floating capital which, in 

 spite of fluctuations, will always stimulate the laboring and 

 trading energies of our people. 



As the policy of the State has thus far found abundant exer- 

 cise for this material force, and has roused every branch of in- 

 dustry to its utmost capacity, so it has made this force the 

 fountain from which our revenues are chiefly derived. It is 

 upon the active capital and industry of our State that taxation 

 mainly falls. It does not bear specially on labor, in a commu- 

 nity organized as ours is ; for while rent and food and clothing 

 rise, labor follows in the same path, and the producing capitalist 

 depends upon the laboring consumer for that very material out 

 of the production of which lie is to pay his taxes and support 



