But if, on the other hand, we repudiate such wholesale abuse of the place, and insist, for truth’s sake, upon an acknowledgment of facts as they exist, then the South can well afford to be found in Wall Street, and if prominent there we may proudly salute her.

Wall Street is the throbbing heart of America’s finance.  It is a common nursery for an infinite variety of enterprises, all over our land.  Innumerable manufactories, North, South, East, and West, have drawn their capital from Wall Street.  The industrial progress and material development of our blessed Southland is being pushed forward vigorously to-day by the monetary backing of Wall Street.  The vast fields of the fertile West, luxurious in the beauty and rich in the promise of tasselled corn and bearded grain, are tilled and harvested by helpful loans from Wall Street.  Old railroads, run down in their physical condition and thereby seriously impaired for public service, are constantly being rehabilitated with Wall Street money, while eight out of every ten new ones draw the means for their construction and equipment from this same source of financial supply.

To all attacks recklessly made on the methods of Wall Street, it seems to me there is ample answer in this one undeniable fact—­the daily business done there foots up in dollars and cents more than the total trade of any whole State of the Union, except New York; and, although the great bulk of transactions are made in the midst of intense excitement, incident to rapid and sometimes violent fluctuation of values, and, although gigantic trades are made binding by only a wink or a nod, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the contracting parties stand rigidly by their bargains, prove they good or bad. [Applause.] So much for the heroic integrity of the so-called bulls and bears.  Out in the broader realm of commercial vocation, and through the wider fields of pastoral pursuit, it occurs to me this lesson might be learned without any reduction of existing morality. [Applause.]

In Wall Street the brainiest financiers are congregated.  Vigorous energy, unremitting industry, clear judgment, and unswerving nerve are absolutely essential to personal success.  In the light of those requirements, we venture to ask what place has the South taken.

Honorable Abram S. Hewitt in his speech before this Society one year ago, said:  “If by some inscrutable providence this list of gentlemen [meaning members of the Southern Society] were suddenly returned to the homes which I suppose will know them no longer, there would be in this city what the quack medicine men call ‘a sense of goneness,’ and I think we should have to send to the wise men of the East, Dr. Atkinson, for example, to tell us how to supply the vacuum.”  Taking my cue from that generous compliment, I venture to suggest that if the South should suddenly withdraw from Wall Street, it would occasion such a contraction of the currency in that