Rensselaer Gazette, Volume 2, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 July 1858 — Gov. Wise on “Greasy Mechanies.” [ARTICLE]

Gov. Wise on “Greasy Mechanies.”

The erratic Governor of Virginia is exhibiting good sense in patronizing the FreeState colonies of Eli Thayer, and whatever tends to promote industrial enterprise in the Old Dominion. In a speech which he made at the funeral ceremonies over the remains of President Monroe, interred at Richmond on the 4th, he said: “It is time that Virginia was turning her attention to manufactories, mechanics, mining and foreign commerce. No country, no State, can live upon one only of the five cardinal powers of production. She muat resort to all the five combined, and she is doing it. Go before you leave here, my friends from New York, and look at the iron factories that are growing up around this noble scenery. I say that labor is not the ‘mud sill’ of society; and I thank God that the old Colonial aristocracy of Virginia, which despised mechanical and manual labor, is nearly run out.- Thank God that we are beginning to raise miners, mechanics and manulacturers, that will help to raise what is left of that aristocracy up to the middle ground of respectability. [Laughter and applause.] Look at the iron factory here; look at the tobacco factory here—that factory is every day stealing my life away with the very weed o£ luxury.” [The Governor chews tobacco freely.] *■