here existed. No happy chance of geographical situation 

 has built here a great city teeming with the wealth of a 

 vast distributing centre. The farms, the homes, the mills, 

 the shops and the banks largely belong to the people of 

 the county. In all the past there has been no unnatural 

 or stimulated growth. Tlie credit of the State has never 

 been pledged to provide means for our development, as had 

 been the case with Mississippi but a few years before 

 Seargent S. Prentiss made the address referred to. A 

 policy which had lifted that young state to the highest 

 pinnacle of financial grandeur, when to have been a 

 Mississippian was better than a Roman "• in that elder day." 

 But all these glories faded in a night, and nowhere was 

 poverty more abject or long continued. But there have been 

 no sources of prosperity in Essex, other than the men who 

 have lived here and the laws which have prevailed here. 

 The colonists were filled with the desire for economic 

 freedom, which was accentuated by the successful founda- 

 tion of religious and political freedom. To this desire had 

 been added the hard lesson of experience which they had 

 learned as subjects of a foreign nation, whose colonial 

 laws were oppressive and exacting in the last degree ; the 

 cardinal principles of which were that all the trade of the 

 colonies was the exclusive possession of that nation, and 

 all their products could only be distributed as it should 

 direct, and that all that was received in return for such 

 products must come from or through the mother country, 

 and be such as it should direct, and that this arbitrary con- 

 trol extended both to the external and internal commerce 

 of the colonies. It was seen that a varied industry was 

 essential to the creation of wealth. The belief of the men 

 of Essex was well expressed by John C. Calhoun, in 

 language used by that eminent statesman before the South 

 had been outstripped by the North in manufactures. 

 " Neither agriculture, manufactures nor commerce takeji 

 separately, is the cause of wealth, it flows from the three 

 combined, and cannot exist without each. The wealth of 



