great industrial centre in which twenty thousand people are employed in
the increase of the amount of steel in the world, before I decide whether
it would be a good thing for the Republic to create another industrial
city of the same sort, I want to know what sort of people the twenty
thousand are, how they live, what their morals are, what intellectual
life they have, what their enjoyment of life is, what they talk about and
think about, and what chance they have of getting into any higher life.
It does not seem to me a sufficient gain in this situation that we are
immensely increasing the amount of steel in the world, or that twenty
more people are enabled on account of this to indulge in an unexampled,
unintellectual luxury. We want more steel, no doubt, but haven't we wit
enough to get that and at the same time to increase among the producers
of it the number of men and women whose horizons are extended, who are
companionable, intelligent beings, adding something to the intellectual
and moral force upon which the real progress of the Republic depends?

There is no place where I would choose to speak more plainly of our
national situation today than in the South, and at the University of the
South; in the South, because it is more plainly in a transition state,
and at the University of the South, because it is here and in similar
institutions that the question of the higher or lower plane of life in
the South is to be determined.

To a philosophical observer of the Republic, at the end of the hundred
years, I should say that the important facts are not its industrial
energy, its wealth, or its population, but the stability of the federal
power, and the integrity of the individual States. That is to say, that
stress and trial have welded us into an indestructible nation; and not of
less consequence is the fact that the life of the Union is in the life of
the States. The next most encouraging augury for a great future is the