North and South, though it was always resorted to as an avail able pretext. In the opening chapter of "Destruction and Reconstruction," by Richard Taylor, lieutenant-general in the Confederate army, the author says that "the Missouri compromise of 1820 was in reality a truce between antagonistic revenue systems, each seeking to gain the balance of power," and that "the nullification movement in South Carolina was entirely directed against the tariff." In the course of a letter to a northern friend, which was published, this same General Taylor said:

"We made two great mistakes. Had we avoided them we should have conquered you. The first was, that we did not substantially destroy the protective features of the tariff in the winter session of 1857 and 1858, by an act which provided a rapid sliding scale to free trade. . . . We could have passed such a law and held it tight on you till it closed the furnaces, workshops, woolen and cotton mills, and steel and bar-iron works of the whole North and West, and scattered your workmen over the prairies and Territories. When the war was ready for you, you would not have been ready for the war. You could not have armed and equipped and put in the field a large army, nor built a large navy. You would have been without supplies, machinery, and workmen, and you would have been without money and credit."

That it is the determination of the Democratic party, as at present organized in the executive and legislative departments of the government, to inflict upon the country the most fatal results that could flow from a sliding scale of tariff duties, is proven by the terms of the President's message and the provisions of the Mills bill as it was given to Congress fresh from the hands of its framers. Its evident design was not to promote symmetry of production and the prosperity of the entire country, but to maintain the industries of the old South-cotton, rice, and sugar-growing-which may be conducted by unskilled and ignorant laborers, and to reduce the people of the North to the level of the masses of those of the South, by closing the "fur naces, workshops, woolen and cotton mills, steel and bar-iron works of the whole North and West."

General Bradley T. Johnson, one of the most eminent lawyers of Maryland, who is justly entitled to the honor he holds, the presidency of the Maryland Confederate Society, because, like the Messrs. Breckenridge, he was not summoned to the Confederate ranks by the call of his State, but made war upon his

State while endeavoring to dismember the Union, neither Maryland nor Kentucky having seceded, this General Johnson, on the 6th of June last, upon the occasion of decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers, delivered an address, in which he said:

"The South is progressing. She is not dead. These old Confederate soldiers and their descendants elect ninety out of every hundred congressmen, thirty-four of the United States senators, and the President of the United States. The government of the United States is controlled by Confederate soldiers. It is always the case that when you get into a position to command respect you will get respect. These old Confederate soldiers are not idle. Their work for twenty-six years in government, in railroads, and in industrial enterprises of all sorts is making itself felt all over this land. In 1890 Texas will send twenty-five men to Congress. The anxiety will be then, not who can carry New York in the election, but who can win in Texas."

These views, maintained with disastrous results through the first century of our history, must not be permitted to mar another century of our national life. The time has come when the controversy must be settled, as it can be, without violence and with great profit to the people of the country. The process by which this result can be attained is simple, peaceful, and beneficent. It is still true, as it was when Joshua was "old and stricken in years," that "there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed." Fortunately, much of this land, lying east of the Mississippi and south of the Potomac and Ohio, is undeveloped, and may be purchased at what, in comparison with its vast stores of natural wealth, are but nominal prices. Whoever will study the geographical position, the topography, and the incalculable natural wealth in fuel, timber, ores, earths, and other resources of Kentucky, and compare them with the prices asked for the land in or on which this wealth slumbers or decays, will see that it needs but an influx of population, capital, energy, and intelligence, such as went to the Pacific Coast between 1849 and 1856, to create from these storehouses of raw materials accumulations of wealth such as the mines of California yielded, but which, under the revenue tariffs of 1846 and 1857, was exported to pay foreigners for commodities which we could have made at home.

What has been said of Kentucky is equally true of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and the Virginias; and

when northern enterprise shall realize the placers and bonanzas it may acquire in any of these States, two questions-free trade and the race question-which agitate the South will settle themselves peaceably and forever. The race issue will be settled by constantly increasing disparity of numbers, and by the unwillingness of the growing millions of the white population of the South to pretend, as is now pretended, to dread the supremacy of the comparatively few colored people who will find prosperity and contentment in the diversified and lucrative employments opened to them by the development of their country.

The argument on this subject was briefly presented by Mr. George B. Cowlam of Knoxville, Tennessee, in a letter he did me the honor to address me on the 11th of last February, from which I submit the following extract, commending it to the careful consideration of every southern man who hopes to see the South in the enjoyment of all the refinements known to man, and happy in its own teeming prosperity.

"The great contest, which has steadily gone on since the Missouri Compromise, between the national policy of home development on the one side, and the colonial policy of exchanging the raw products of agriculture for foreign manufactures on the other side, can never be decided by letters or speeches or party platforms or general elections. Not even legislation, or the still higher arbitrament of arms, can settle an economic question of such magnitude. Standing alone all these forces can produce nothing more stable than a record written upon sand; excepting, always, the costs and losses of the struggle which still goes on.

"The national cause has advanced because behind its skirmish line of public discussion, printer's ink, legislation, and armed hosts has marched a supporting column of the invincible forces of modern progress—steam engines and machinery, the railroad, the mill, the factory, the furnace, and the mine-organizing the division of labor and the profitable exchange of its products, and permanently occupying and holding the ground won. And this is the only force that can hold the ground.

"The tramp ships and tramp cargoes of England, hunting every nook and corner of the earth for a market for her surplus, illustrates better than any words can do the colonial policy on the one side. The investment of capital from every part of the civilized world, and notably from England, in American railways, mills, mines, and furnaces, illustrates the value and advantage of compact national development on the other side. Profit is the first law of trade, and that English capital seeks investment in American enterprises is a better proof of what they really think of our national policy than the utterances of the Cobden Club."

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The philosophy of Mr. Cowlam is indisputable, and the capitalists, miners, and manufacturers of the North should hasten to apply it to the South, and especially to the southern Appalachian plateaus and mountains which, though literally gorged with the elements of all the diverse manufactures known to our age, and with natural gradients for railroads parallel with the water-courses which drain their surface, are yet a wilderness and inaccessible to population-the one element necessary to transmute their crude materials into forms of utility and beauty.

While England and her European rivals are striving to create markets for their surplus productions by conquest and the establishment of colonies and trading-posts among remote and widely separated families of semi-barbarians, these undeveloped mountain regions of our own country contain native wealth sufficient to enable the southern States east of the Mississippi to sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today, and to afford remunerative markets for the surplus productions of every section of the country. By the employment of our manual, mechanical, and scientific means of production in their industries, including "furnaces, workshops, woolen and cotton mills, and steel and bar-iron works," which were enumerated by General Richard Taylor as essential to the maintenance of national life, the people of these mountain States will settle forever the question of our reduction to commercial dependence, by demanding such duties on imports as will defend their labor and capital against fatal foreign assaults.

The railroad mileage of this portion of the South has more than doubled since 1879. Yet it is but about 25,000 miles, and includes but one mile of railroad to each twenty-three square miles of territory, while the northern States east of the Mississippi have a mile of road to each seven square miles. To make the railroad mileage of the two regions equal, will require the building of 54,000 miles of new road. What a field for northern capital, enterprise, energy, culture, religion, and patriotism does the contemplation of these figures suggest!

WILLIAM D. KELLEY.

SHALL RAILWAY POOLING BE PERMITTED?

THE Inter-State Commerce Law forbids one railway to charge openly or by device,

'any person

dered
it charges
service."

a greater or less compensation for any service renin the transportation of passengers or property . . . than any other person .. for a like and contemporaneous

This was to secure equal and stable rates. When the same law deals with the same competitive traffics transported by two or more rival carriers, it says it shall be unlawful

"to enter into any contract, agreement, or combination, for the pooling of freights of competing railroads, or to divide between them . . . the earnings of such railroads."

This prohibition stimulates two or more carriers to make unequal and unstable rates, because all routes are not alike in facility.

A law which requires uniform and non-discriminating rates on one line and legalizes diverse rates on various lines, is inconsistent, and tends to produce the discriminations its text prohibits. The inconsistency results from legislative lack of knowledge of the vast problem, from political timidity, and from the mistaken idea that railway competition can be regulated by the mercantile laws governing the sales of corn or sugar. If the public interest requires one line to charge reasonable and just rates alike to all, why should various rates prevail over different lines for like service? If the all-rail rate on grain from Chicago to New York be 25 cents per 100 pounds by some routes and 15 cents by others, the preferences and discriminations forbidden by the act ensue to individuals and localities precisely as if the same two rates existed simultaneously on one railway, because the cheapest railway cannot carry all the traffic. Furthermore, if two