Gulf States in which already handsome sums have been expended. Let us take a retrospective view of this country of an hundred years, and we will see that the material wealth of the South was transcendently in excess of the North, and that prior to the American war the greatest stores of the world were hidden from the sight of the people. Pennsylvania is abundantly rich, and yet East Tennessee, and some sections of other comparatively small States, are richer in diversified mineral wealth and great natural resources than our own boasted commonwealth. Colonel Printup, of Georgia, said he would briefly state that the iron region to which reference had been made extends into North and South Carolina, the northwestern portion of Georgia, into Alabama, and he presumed would reach to a portion of Mississippi also. There was hardly anything he could say to give his hearers an idea of the immense quantities of iron that exist in Alabama. Mountains of iron could be found in almost every portion of the State, which by analysis had been proven to yield from forty to seventy-five per cent. of pure iron. They have some of the finest ores in America, and the experiment of manufacturing steel from it is now being successfully prosecuted. Specimens of ore crop out at every step you take, and they seem to be quite as prominent as those in Tennessee. We cordially invite gentlemen from the North to come down among us and examine for themselves, and we will extend to them a very hearty welcome. The coal and iron beds of Alabama lie within a short distance of each other. There is a large iron mountain in Alabama, and within four miles of it you find plenty of coal, limestone, sandstone, and rich deposits of lead, all within a circumference of four miles. The mountain is almost a solid bed of iron. There is also an iron hill in Alabama, which lies parallel to the Selma Railroad, about sixty miles in length, composed almost entirely of iron. Superior sandstone, bituminous coal, and various other minerals and splendid lead deposits are also here to be seen. The people of Alabama are a little behind in the way of cultivation, but they were in hopes the North would send them some good scientific farmers to improve their agricultural system, and they would profit by the example. Indeed, they had improved very much lately, from the fact that some Virginia farmers had gone down and introduced the system of Northern agriculture. This has benefited and enhanced their lands in value very materially. Clover had been successfully raised in small fields before the war, but he had no idea how long it would last. In the hills. and valleys of Georgia they were enabled to raise all kinds of fruit. In the Northern part of Georgia the peach is a spontaneous production,

and along the railroad you will see lines of peach trees, but this is not the case with apples, which only flourish with cultivation.

Judge Cartter remarked that he discovered, while in the Andes, the higher the latitude the finer the fruit, and especially with apples. They have a much finer flavor when grown on high hills, and the trees have a greater power of endurance.

Colonel Printup said that in Alabama nearly all the fruits of the extreme South and the extreme North could be successfully cultivated.

In addition to what was said by the gentlemen who participated in the meeting held at Mr. Forney's rooms, we have more direct testimony from a New England gentleman, who writes as follows to the New York Times, describing the country through which passes the Railroad of which John C. Stanton, of Boston, is President, and Governor Clafflin, of Massachusetts, one of the Directors:

"The Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad will pass through the richest portion of the American continent, a district that, in the fertility of the soil, the salubrity of the climate, the immensity of its mineral resources, and its wonderful water power, has few rivals and no superior. It passes through a magnificent grain and cattle-growing region, and then through the heart of one of the finest bodies of cotton lands in the world. In the northern portions of the country through which the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad passes, there are inexhaustible supplies of iron and coal. The iron is in some cases of such rare excellence that horse-shoes are sometimes made directly from the ore by country blacksmiths. Mr. Thomas, a very wealthy ironmaster from Pennsylvania, has invested three hundred thousand dollars in iron and coal lands in the vicinity of Elyton. The Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad Company owns 256,000 acres of the finest lands in the world that lie along the line of the road. These will be thrown open to immigration on the most favorable terms."

ALABAMA AS A HOME FOR THE IMMIGRANT.

Invitation for white labor-Remarks of Count de Segur-Views of Chas. Nordhoff-Success of white labor in the South-Statement of Gov. Hammond-Views of Edward Atkison—Disinterested statement of the Washington Chronicle-Indorsement of Hon. John W. ForneySouthern homes peaceful, cheap and productive, etc.

We have shown the resources of Alabama, its boundless minerals, fertile cotton fields, salubrious climate, and splendid system of water courses and railroads. The lands of Alabama can be purchased by the immigrant at low rates-for a mere song compared with the profits which the laborer can realize in a single season.

We have before us a pamphlet prepared in 1864, by a very intelligent gentleman of New York, connected with one of the leading journals of that city-Charles Nordhoff, Esq. The author shows in detail how white laborers have heretofore emigrated from the South northward, in numbers many times greater than the reverse migration. He remarks upon the facts as follows:

"A French writer, the Count de Segur, says: "The human race does not march in that direction; it turns its back to the North; the sun attracts its regards, its desires and its steps. It is no easy matter to arrest this great current.' In other countries all emigration has turned to the southward, by an instinctive movement; but with us the horror of slavery, the aversion of the free laborer to come in contact and competition with slave labor, has sufficed to conquer even this strong instinctive tendency.

"Bear in mind, too, that the South has lost, by this migration, the best class of her citizens. The indolent masters remained; the slaves remained; those free whites who were too poor and helpless and ignorant either to desire or to be able to remove, remained; but there has been a constant drain of the yeomanry of the border Slave States-the forehanded farmers and industrious mechanics, the class whom a State can least afford to lose. These men and their families have helped to fill our northwestern Territories and States; and have taken the places of the thousands who removed from the border Free States in the Northwest. They have faced unwonted winters and harder conditions of life -why? Because these free workingmen felt slavery to be a curse, a bar to all their efforts. They were not abolitionists-they brought into the

Free States with them their curious hatred of the negro, as though it was the slave and not the master who was their oppressor."

Mr. Nordhoff is not satisfied that this state of things should longer exist. He will not give up the fairest spot on earth to the negro. He would send the white man with his energy, his enterprise and cunning to take charge of the teeming and luxuriant fields, and make a garden out of the desert of the South. Will the white man respond? Slavery is dead.

We give a page or two from the pamphlet:

"Is it no matter to workingmen that they are thus driven out and kept out of the largest, most fertile and pleasantest part of the Union, by the slave labor system, which there robs them of work, and attacks their rights? In the mild climate of the border Slave States, the seasons are longer, the productions more varied; trades which can be pursued in the North during only eight or nine months, may be carried on there all the year round; food is or ought to be cheaper; the workingman and his family need fewer and less costly clothes; in many ways the conditions of life are easier, for the mechanic and laborer as well as the farmer, than in the colder North. But that great region the slave-masters closed against the free workingmen, and preserved for themselves and their slaves.

"The climate is not too hot in any of those States for white men and women to labor in the fields. Governor Hammond, of South Carolina, says: "The steady heat of our summers is not so prostrating as the short but sudden and frequent heats of Northern summers.' White men work on the levee in New Orleans in midsummer, and have the severest labor put upon them at that. He who writes this has rolled cotton and sugar upon the levee of New Orleans in the month of July, and screwed cotton in Mobile Bay in August. Dr. Cartwright, the great apostle of slavery, rightly remarked: Here in New Orleans the large part of the drudgery—work requiring exposure to the sun, as railroad making, street paving, dray driving, ditching and building-is performed by white people.' This severe labor was put upon the free white workingmen; the slave-owners reserved the light task for their slaves.

"In Alabama, by the census of 1850, sixty-seven thousand; in Mississippi, fifty-five thousand; in Texas, forty-seven thousand white men, non-slaveholders, labored in the fields, and took no hurt. Cotton was cultivated in Texas, before the war, with perfect success, by white men; the Germans managed even to raise more pounds to the acre, pick it cleaner, and to get a higher price for it, than the neighboring planters. Olmsted mentions an American in Texas who would not employ slave

labor, and who, with white men as his help, 'produced more bales to the hand than any planter around him.'

"The mortality reports of the census show that the Southern States are not peculiarly unhealthful. In Alabama, the deaths, per cent., were less than in Connecticut; in Georgia they are 1.23 per cent.; in New York, 1.22; in South Carolina they are 1.44 per cent., in Massachusetts, 1.76, which is precisely the same as in Louisiana, notoriously, till General Butler cleaned New Orleans and drove out the yellow-fever, the most sickly State in the South.

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Nothing, therefore, has kept free workingmen out of these Statesnearer to the great markets of the world, having abundant mineral wealth, and in every way more favorably situated than the cold Northeast and the far away Northwest-except the fatal competition of the slaveholders. To avoid that, millions of workingmen, native and foreign born, have removed to the Northwest, until at last the tide of emigration has even trenched upon the inhospitable desert, and has spread beyond the extreme limits of arable land, and far beyond the profitable reach of markets. The Northwestern farmer has burned his corn because he could not afford to send it to the distant seaboard;--was it no loss to him that slavery kept him out of the fertile fields of Virginia and North Carolina?

"Even had slavery remained in full vigor, the time had come when free labor, seeking new outlets and greater opportunities, would have pressed hardly upon it. If slavery is swept away, free workingmen will hereafter have opportunity in the South, and to all that great region a boundless future of wealth and prosperity opens up. The abandoned farms, the mouldering villages, the empty cottages, will once more be filled with the busy and cheerful hum of the labor of freemen.

"Their cunning will repair the waste of unskillful slave labor; their ingenious toil will redeem the barren fields of Virginia and other Southern States. The tide of emigration, sweeping in that direction, may repeat in the South the marvelous results which it has accomplished during the last twenty-five years in the Northwest; Virginia will be another Minnesota, North Carolina a new Iowa, and in Tennessee will be repeated the story of Ohio."

In addition to what is here said by Mr. Nordhoff, we would call attention to the following remarks made by Mr. Edward Atkison, a cotton manufacturer of Massachusetts, in a pamphlet prepared at the instance of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, of New York:

"It is perhaps needful that we should induce emigration from southern Europe before the question of the cultivation of large crops in