THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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importance, would also be eliminated; and the coasting trade for small craft among those rich and fertile countries lying to the south along the Pacific, which embraces most valuable product, would grow to enormous proportions and would belong exclusively to the Southern States.
Indeed, the condition attendant upon the throwing open of direct and easy communication, through the Nicaragua Canal, is so supremely and undeniably advantageous that they justify the prediction that San Francisco on the Pacific, and New York on the Atlantic, will thereby command the markets of the world, while the ports of the states of the South must proportionately grow and prosper under the splendid impetus of expanding trade to become shortly great and important commercial centers.
The Southern group of states has an area of eight hundred thousand square miles, with a population of a little over nineteen million. Running through their center extends the southern Appalachian -region, along whose northwestern slope stretches a continuous and unbroken coal-field of incalculable value, heavily timbered, with a productive soil and a healthful and cool climate. Lying toward the east spreads another strip of high, mountainous country, rising over two thousand feet above sea level. These ranges are covered with dense forests of varied and most valuable wood, and are prolific in slates, fine clays, marbles, ores, copper and other minerals, with a wealth of iron which only equals its colossal wealth in coal. Piled up in the center of these Southern States lies this magazine of enormous natural resources, greater far than those ever possessed by Great Britain, and surrounded by more than a half million square miles of lands whose fertility and productiveness is beyond computation.
It is incontestable that here is the section which offers the most advantageous sites for economical iron-making, for the needed materials lie close at hand, and economy in transporting this raw material gives to the manufacturer of iron enormous advantages over competing branches of that industry, located as they are at great distances in the North and West. The irresistible logic of circumstances has been recognized, and Birmingham, the iron city of the South, has grown into importance and wealth through her blast-furnaces and great iron industries, while others are being erected in various localities to make of the South, as Mr. Edward Atkinson says, “ the future situs of the principal iron production of the world.” And it may be pertinent to add that the recent splendid invention, called the Basaic process, for making steel of iron containing phosphorus, will unquestionably turn the scale for steel manufacture in favor of the South, by throwing open to her the possibility of furnishing at a lower cost, for the Southern railroads, whose extension and ramification over vast areas establish an inexhaustible market, those steel rails now manufactured by the steel mills of Pennsylvania and Illinois, and furnished by them to the Southern railroad companies.
In the Flat Top Region, in the great Kanawha Basin, in the Warnor Field, and elsewhere throughout these states, where coal mining has but recently been inaugurated, the coal trade amounts to millions of tons yearly, and gives employment to thousands of men, besides furnishing an enormous volume of paying freight to the railroads. The coal fields of the South, by their extent and depth, are practically beyond the limits of definite measurement, and the coal trade, yet in its infancy in that section, bids fair to spread far beyond the limits of this country.
It may be added in this connection, that Mobile and Pensacola are now making extensive improvements in their harbor facilities to accommodate the greatly increasing export trade of coal to Mexico and Central and South America, brought by railroads for shipment from these ports.
These rich timber districts are vast in area and extensive in variety. Here the yellow and white pines, the white, black, Spanish and chestnut oaks, the chestnut, walnut, hickory, poplar, cherry and laurel intermingle their luxuriant foliage and mutely testify to the keen-sighted lumberman and manufacturer of the West and East, that the lands which produce so superb a growth will likewise furnish the means to satisfy a most laudable ambition—that of becoming, through their agency, a successful and wealthy citizen.