The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 441, Apr. 1888, U. of Illinois Press

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APRIL · 1888 could such valuable property be purchased for so little money as at present in Alabama and other Southern States. Landed estates which in Antebellum days could not be purchased for $~5 per acre can now be had for $4. Land owners who co years ago would not part with their land to the Negro partly because of prejudice and partly because the owners thought that their financial salvation lay in holding on to their lands, are now ready and anxious to sell to black or white, and often it is the old family homestead that has been sacred, where generations of slaveholders have been born and reared that is offered for sale. I do not rejoice at the misfortune of the southern white man, for he is my brother, but I do feel it a duty to urge that his extremity is our opportunity to buy the foundation for a high civilization that is fraught with the most favorable conditions. If the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations, who knows, but what God in His divine goodness means through the enslavers improvidence to repay the enslaved that of which he has been robbed. The South possesses a soil as rich and productive as that of any country on the globe a soil that is capable of producing almost every kind of vegetation and of making that section ''blossom as the rose'' and to become a land of plenty. But one element Is wanting and that is brains every acre of her low lands and hills and valleys needs to be presided over by and impregnated with brains. One Macedonian cry is for brains- brains controlled and directed by religion and conscience. The South is not crowded. Thirty-two inhabitants to every square mile is perhaps the present average population. An increase of 50,000,000 of people in the Southern States could be accommodated and still the population would not be as dense as that of Pennsylvania. In view of all these facts do you wonder, gentlemen, that even at the risk of disappointing you in my selection I have decided to occupy you in the discussion of a subject so utilitarian? The time is not far distant when a larger proportion of the educated among us will seek callings outside of the school-room and other professional pursuits and will enter upon careers that will have material gain more directly for their object, and so might it be. It is this aspect of my subject that I shall discuss first. To the budding capitalists, the lumber resources of the South pre4