afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in
divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest--not set
amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in
despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which
neither season nor soil has set a limit--this system of industries is
mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world. That,
sir, is the picture and the promise of my home--a land better and fairer
than I have told you, and yet but fit setting in its material excellence
for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against that, sir,
we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy loins,
shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers, and touching
this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet--while in
the Eldorado of which I have told you but fifteen per cent of its lands
are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched, and its population so scant
that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be
heard from Virginia to Texas--while on the threshold of nearly every
house in New England stands a son, seeking, with troubled eyes, some new
land in which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains
that in 1880 the South had fewer northern-born citizens than she had in
1870--fewer in '70 than in '60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the
section line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of
the North have crossed it over to the South, than when it was crimson
with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood
guard every inch of its way?

There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to
consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the
fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands
whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it
will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp
in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing,
sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear
understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and
such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and
Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Manassas and Gettysburg, and
illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was
ever wrought with the sword or sough