Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County, Texas. Page: 267 of 1,110

IIIS'ORY OF DALLAS COUNTY.

conditions that made other crops impossible
or under allurements that made other crops
exceptional, its dominion would be despotism.
Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances
the wisdom of husbandry the money
crop is a curse. When it stimulates the general
economy of the farm, it is the profit of
farming. In an unprosperous strip of Carolina,
when asked the cause of their poverty,
the people say 'Tobacco, for it is our only
crop." In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the richest
American county by the census, when asked
the cause of their prosperity, they say "Tobacco,
for it is the golden crown of a diversified
agriculture." The soil that produces cotton
invite the grains and grasses, the orchard and
the vine. Clover, corn, cotton, wheat and
barley thrive in the same enclosure. The
peach, the apple, the apricot, the Siberian
crab in the same orchard. HIerds and flocks
graze ten months every year in meadows over
which winter is but a passing breath, and in
which spring and autumn meet in summer's
heat. Sugar cane and oats, rice and potatoes,
are extremes that come together under our
skies. To raise cotton and send its princely
revenue to the West for supplies and to the
East for usury, would be a misfortune if soil
and climate forced such a curse. When both
invite independence, to remain in slavery is
a crime. To mortgage oLr farms in Boston
for money with which to buy meat and bread
from western cribs and smokehouses is folly
unspeakable. I rejoice that Texas is less open
to this charge than others of the cotton
States. With her 80,000,000 bushels of grain
and her 16,000,000 head of stock she is
rapidly learning that diversified agriculture
means prosperity. Indeed, the South
is learning the same lesson, and learned
through years of debt and dependence it will
never be forgotton. The best thing Georgia

has done in twenty years was to raise her oat
crop in one season from 2,000,000 to 9,000,000
bushels without losing a bale of her cotton.
It is more for the South that she has
increased her crop of corn-that best of
grains, of which Samuel J. Tilden said "itwill
be the staple food of the future, and men will
be stronger and better when that day comes"
-by 43,000,000 bushels this year than to have
won a pivotal battle in the late war. In this
one item she keeps at home this year a sum
equal to the entire cotton crop of any State,
that last year went to the West. This is the
road to prosperity. It is the way to manliness
and sturdiness of character. When
every farmer in the South shall eat bread
from his own fields and meat from his own
pastures-and disturbed by no creditor and
enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teemning
gardens and orchards and vineyards, and
dairies and barnyards, pitching his crops in
his own wisdom and growing them in independence,
making cotton his clean surplus
and selling it in his own time and his chosen
market and not at a master's bidding, getting
his pay in cash and not in a receipted rnortgage
that discharges his debt, but does not
restore his freedom----then shall be breaking
the fullness of our day. Great is king cotton!
But to lie at his feet while the user and grainraiser
bind us in subjection, is to invite the
contempt of Inan and the reproach of God.
But to stand up before him, and amid our
cribs and smtokehouses wrest from him the
magna charta of our independence and to establish
in his name an ample and diversified
agriculture that shall honor him while it
enriches us-this is to carry us as far in the
way of happiness and independence as the
farmer working in the fullest wisdom and in
the richest fields can carry any people. (Applause.)