Loudon Free Press

From the Washington Republic, July 21.

Charleston Enterprise.

If Georgia be the Empire State of the South, Charleston is the Boston of that section. She has recently completed her arrangements for a railroad to Cincinnati upon a line of survey only 631 miles in length. She will also connect with Louisville by a line of 600 miles. The shortest Baltimore line with Cincinnati is, we believe, 630 miles. Charleston will thus attract a large proportion of the provision and manufactures of the Ohio valley, and in the next war we shall have regiments of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana volunteers coming down to defend the outlet of their trade at Charleston, as their fathers did at New-Orleans; and when abolitionists come to set free the negros who wear the goods, eat the bacon, and work the mules of the North-west, the volunteers will rise up and aid in their expulsion, upon the plainest and most inevitable reason—because it will be their interest to do so.

We note, moreover, that a plan is on foot to make a rail road coastwise from Charleston to Savannah, and the latter city will place herself directly in the line of communication with the Gulf and the Pacific by a rail road to Pensacola. Charleston has thus secured access to the Gulf—the central Mississippi at Memphis and the great meat-house and meat tub of the Union—the Ohio valley. We have observed, moreover, that a contract has been made for the manufacture in Charleston of all the rolling stock of the New-Orleans and Opelousas rail road. There are other evidences of industrial prosperity which account in our mind for the profound quiet of South-Carolina, and convince us that she is organizing a practical power that will rely upon itself for protection, and that she will no longer be as thin-skinned and sensitive as those who do not prosper in the world are in their relations with those who do.

Every friend of the Union has been delighted with the restoration of calm in the Southern States, and the abatement of that bitterness with which some of them regarded the exercise of an indispensable authority by the Federal Government. We have always thought that these political prejudices were engendered by an acute apprehension of oppression on the part of those who lead public opinion, operating upon a stagnant and unprofitable condition of popular industry in the older Southern States. It was from these causes that the decline in commerce in the Southern cities was attributed to the tariff, and the reduction in the value of lands, or the relative diminution of their population, was charged as the insidious results of system of government which fostered one section and depressed another. The experience, however, of the last few years past has taught the South that the true cause of the growing inequality of the sections consisted in the adoption by the one of all those institutions and improvements which attract population, and the positive opposition of the other to every system of industrial development.

The statesmen of the South persisted in the theory of Plato, that agriculture was the only desirable interest. Their arguments against protection were often carried to a prejudice against the manufacturing interest itself. They carried their prejudices against sections so far as to discourage immigration, especially of the Yankees. They relied upon remedies wholly political. The balance of power was to be preserved by the admission of an equal number of new States upon the fallacious theory that equality in the Senate constituted an equal participation in the power of the Government.—

Experience has however, convinced the South that the constitutional rule of power is not territory, nor past services, but people, and that people can be only attracted or retained by offering them industrial and social inducements. The conviction of this great truth has spread over the South from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. Everywhere the rich and cheap lands, the coal beds and water power are thrown open; every facility is afforded to the ingress of foreign population and the investment of capital; harbors are deepened, channels opened, and every preparation made for the commercial accommodation of the interior products.

The consequences of this change of system; are already apparent in the growth of Southern cities, the enhanced value of lands and slaves, and in the success of their manufacturing experiments. This universal prosperity has produced content. The Government is no longer looked on as the sole cause of sectional inequality; its advantages have been proven to belong to those who acquire the elements of wealth and population. Schools and canals founded the power of New-York, and she has now the collection of seventy-five per cent of the national revenue, and an electoral vote equal perhaps to the joint vote of both the Carolinas and Virginia.

The growth of positive power in the Southern States has not only promoted the permanence of the Union by rendering sectional oppression impossible, but it has engendered another influence of the utmost importance. The system of physical development has been carried out to a great extent with the aid of northern capital. We would be glad if the author of the money articles in the Herald would state approximately the amount of money invested by the capitalists, iron-masters and machinists of the Northern States in the State and corporate securities of the South—in coal mines, town sites and steam lines; it would show an aggregate, we are satisfied, that will be found to constitute an immense debt, and it is but preparatory to the incalculable investments which will follow the completed system. This result has already given the Southern States the hostage of human interest for the permanence of institutions, and every day its influence in disabusing northern and southern minds of sectional prejudices will become more apparent.

And this has been done with the object of so uniting the interests of this great national family as that it is neither to their advantage to quarrel nor divide. It is the triumph of the American over the Achaean system. The one a league of temporary convenience, where the whole confederacy might be taken to pieces in a moment, like a piece of artillery, the other so bolted and riveted together that the whole fabric must be employed together or not at all.