14 



tolerated it ; and, when 3-011 have come to this wholesome condition of 

 mind, 3*011 will wonder how the devil 3*00 could have been so slow in 

 seeing it. [Laughter.] 



Are you not asking Northern men to come here, and do 3-011 not 

 seek Northern capital? If you suppose either will come here unless 

 eveiy man can sa3' what he pleases, as I do now, 3*ou are mistaken. 



These are not mere haphazard questions. You have j-ourselves 

 implanted an ingrained distrust of your own people, of 3*our lands, 

 of the possibility of white men's labor, of 3*our climate, and of 3'our 

 soil, in the minds of men in other States and in other countries that 

 it will take a generation to remove. It will be necessaiy for 3*ou to 

 repl3' to these questions, and to help the removal of these false ideas, 

 in order to overcome the prejudices that you yourselves have created, 

 else the tide of immigration will continue to pass b3* you, and your 

 lands will be sparsely occupied for half a centiny more. 



Didn't 3*011 as a people bear your testimony that white men could 

 not make cotton? Didn't you believe it? 



Didn't you make the world almost believe it? 



Was not I subjected almost to ridicule in 1SG1, when I predicted 

 and proved that larger crops of cotton would be made at less cost by 

 free labor, and by white labor as well as black, than could possibly 

 be made by slaves, in my pamphlet on -'Cheap Cotton by Free 

 Labor;" when also I proved from 3*0111' own records that the mean 

 summer temperature of your upland cotton country was lower than 

 that of some parts of the cit3* of Philadelphia, and that the average 

 of the extremes of heat was greater in St. Louis than in New Orleans ? 



Who then would have admitted, as I then asserted, that if there 

 were a variet3* of the cotton plant capable of being grown in the 

 North or West, producing no lint but onl}* seed, it would be one of 

 our most valuable crops, as flax seed now is in some parts of the 

 West, although the flax stalks are all burned. 



Is not 3*our whole system of ginning, baling, pressing, and mar- 

 keting cotton to-da3* about as crude and as bad as ever, not quite, 

 but nearty so? 



When you get up this exhibition, I want 3*011 to make one part of 

 it permanent. You should establish a historic museum, before it is 

 too late, as a landmark by which to measure .your own progress in 

 the next decade, and in which to save some of the relics of the past. 



Begin with a u nigger hoe " and a bull-tongue plough, a model of a 

 common gin-stand of the old times, a picture of a pile of seed along- 

 side rotting and wasting ; and with these place the hand loom and 

 the spinning wheel of 3*our mountain district with some of 3*our home- 

 spun goods. Put into this museum the best, the medium, and the 

 common doings, and I venture to predict 3'ou will say to me a few 

 3*ears hence, about the economic aspect of the case, what one of my 

 most valued friends in Georgia said to me a few 3*ears since, when 

 speaking of the moral and political aspect of slavery, " that he looked 

 back with utter horror, wonder, and amazement upon practices which 

 were then tolerated and unthought of because they were customary." 



