Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County, Texas. Page: 268 of 1,110
vii, 9-1011 p. incl. ill., ports. : ports. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this book.
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HISTORY OF DALLAS COUNTY.
But agriculture alone, no matter how rich
or varied its resources, cannot establish or
maintain a people's prosperity. There is a
lesson in this that Texas, even with her
amazing total of $137,000,000 of farm products,
may learn with profit. No commonwealth
ever came to greatness by producing
raw material. Less can this be possible in
the future than in the past. The Comstock
lode is the richest spot on earth, and yet the
miners, gasping for breath fifteen hundred
feet below the earth's surface, get bare existence
out of the splendor they dig from the
earth. It goes to carry the commerce and
uphold the industry of distant lands, of which
the men who produce it get but a dim report.
Hardly more isthe South profited when, stripping
the harvest of her cotton fields or stripping
her teeming hills, orleveling her superb
forests, she sends the raw material to auginent
the wealth and power of distant communities.
(Applause.) Texas produces a
million and a half bales of cotton, which
yield her $60,000,000. That cotton woven
into common goods would add $75,000,000
toTexas' income from this crop, employ 220,000
operatives, who would draw and spend
within her borders more than $30,000,000 in
wages. Massachusetts manufactures 575,000
bales of cotton, for which she pays 31,000,000
and sells for $72,000,000, adding a value
nearly equal to Texas' gross revenue from
cotton, and yet Texas has a clean advantage
for manufacturing this cotton of 1 per cent.
a pound over Massachusetts. The little village
of Grand Rapids began manufacturing
furniture, simply because it was set in timber
districts. It is now a great city, and sells
$10,000,000 worth of furniture every
year, in making which 12,000 men are
employed and a population of 40,000 people
supported. The best pine districts ofthe world are in eastern Texas. With
less competiton and wider markets than
Grand Rapids has, will she ship her forests
at prices that barely support the wood-chopper
and sawyer, to be returned, in the making
of which great cities are built or maintained?
When her farmers and herdsmen draw from
her cities $136,000,000 as the price of their
annual produce, shall this enormous wealth
be scattered through distant shops and factories,
leaving in the hands of Texans no
more than the husbandman's support and the
narrow brokerage between buyer and seller?
As one-crop farming cannot support the
country, neither can a single resource of commercial
exchange support a city. Texas
wants immigrants. She needs them, for if
every human being in Texas were placed at
equidistant points throughout the State no
Texan could hear the sound of a human voice
in all your borders. How can you best attract
immigration ? By furnishing work for
the artisan and mechanic. If you meet the
demand of your population for cheaper and
essential manufactured articles, one half a
million workers would be needed for this, and
with their families would double the population
of your State. In these mechanics and
their dependents, farmers would find a near
and growing market for not only their staple
crops, but for truck that they now despise to
raise or sell, but that is at last the cream of the
farm. Worcester county, Massachusetts, takes
$52,000,000 of our material, and turns out
$87,000,000 of products every year, paying
$20,000,000 in wages. The most prosperous
section of this world is that known as the
Middle States of this Republic. Their agriculture
and manufactures are in the balance.
Their shops and factories are set amid rich
and ample acres, and the result is such deep
and diffused prosperity as no other section
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Lewis Publishing Company. Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County, Texas., book, 1892; Chicago, Illinois. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth20932/m1/268/?rotate=90: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Public Library.