I beg to acknowledge receipt of your favor of the 20th enclosing copy of your letter to General Davidson. I immediately came to Asheville, though I have been very ill for ten days, to confer with the General, and he showed me the letters the Superintendent of the Prison had witten you about this Railroad Company's work.

I regret exceedingly when the Superintendent was investigating this Railroad Company that he didn't invite some of the Company's officers to meet him in person on the property, or invite us to meet him here at Asheville, or anywhere else. If he had done so, he could easily have had every item that he thinks he found to the discredit of this railroad in its relation to this property and of any loss possible to the State, fully explained, and every point that he lays stress on concerning this Railroad Company's doings and acts could have been shown to him were being done for the best possible interest of the State.

The very incipiency and beginning of the work, was to accomplish the very purpose, and it will ultimately do it, that you are so intensely interested in at this time; that of stopping freight rate discrimination in this State, and by your co-operation when the proper time comes for us to ask you for it, you will find the work to construct this Railroad could not have been carried on in the face of the obstacles that we have to overcome by any other method than the one being followed.

I wish to eliminate saying, or making a statement as regards the enemies of this work for the present. You will soon know them face to face.

This road, that is doing more for this State at home and abroad than any other effort that is being made for its release, was under the pretense of friendship for the State, seeking to gratify personal dislikes, called before the Legislature under a lying indictment for investigation for to try to force facts to be revealed that our enemies have been unable to obtain.

We challenged them to prove in a million miles of a single on of the charges being true, and they failed, ignominiously failed. We met the investigation and the double committee, who looked into all the contracts for convicts as the resolutions required, and, after hearing all the complaint, recommended that a resolution be passed by the General Assembly and it did pass, without a dissenting vote. That there be no interference with the contract now existing between the States and various railroads for the use of convicts until their lines were completed, but that no more convict contracts should thereafter be made.

I had the honor with General Davidson to appear before those committees, and we satisfied them that practically a half million dollars had been spent, principally by citizens of North Carolina, putting this road to where success could be made, the totel amount of cash that the State has put up as good faith money in feeding a few convicts against this expenditure ought to put the blush of shame on any set of men, knowing the purpose of this work, to make criticism, when they have no knowledge, whatever of the inside workings, of the brain, the energy and the talent of the men that are advising and directing the work for this State's protection.

This little bunch of convicts, insignificant as it is, is simply the little nucleus around which foreign capital has been brought to believe that this State is acting in good faith.

This Railroad Company has asked for no more convicts, don't want any more yet; this little bunch is accomplishing all we expected them to accomplish until other things are done that we are demanding shall be done by those who propose to build the road, and these delays on our part are being done to protect the State.

As to why new tools haven't been furnished lately, and why a few men's pay rolls have not been met on which the Superintendent has laid so much stress with perfect good intent, no doubt, can be explained to your entire satisfaction.

Not only the roads you are fighting, but those with others through their money heads, have been fighting us throughout the United States and Europe; and as long as we kept letting the publis know all we were doing, we kept out enemies posted just where to set pegs to delay our work.

So, to escape a continual roasting, we are like the proverbial Job's turkey, the poorer we seem for the present, the safer our enterprise is and the better off we are.

We are keeping as nearly as we can out of the news papers, and we asked the Committee to please not furnish the news papers the information that was given them in executive session. We explained sufficient number of facts to the Committee for them to recommend that we be let alone.

If you remember, at the very opening of the session, I called on you one morning and told you there were a bunch of convicts that would be idle, and that you could send them to the Trans-Continental Camp, and they could be utilized there until we were ready for the pushing of the work. You said you would look into the matter, and asked me to write you the prospects and the progress we were making, which I did after my arrival in New York. I sent you a letter from the General Counsel in charge of the financial work with full, clear, detailed explanation that the delay had been caused by the Balkan War holding up the Continental subscription, and that everything would be closed up as soon as practical after peace was declared, and those subscriptions are now all practically closed and the legal work being finished.

But this information is for your own personal knowledge, not for anybody else; for, if it was known how close we are to victory, the war dogs of the financial institution, from San Francisco to Berlin would be on our tracks; and I suppose General Davidson will write you the facts, as he advised me when he had time he would make answer to your letter.

And I wish to advise you that there are certain contracts, that call for many thousands of dollars, that have to be paid on the Tennessee Division of this road on the 1st day of August, in addition to what has already been paid. Those are miles of road that we control in the work to relieve this State that your Superintendent didn't happen to walk over; while we don't want him, or any other body to know that we already have thirty-eight miles in operation that will come under our name by the middle of August. And it is strange that so much fuss has to be made about the few little convicts on the Trans-Continental, when not a word has been said about sixty miles of railroad, graded entirely by convicts in Eastern Carolina in these last few years, and is laying there idle and they can't raise the money to put ties on it, much less put it in operation.

I am sure General Davidson will advise you that we have practically every possible reason, sound and conservative business men could give and ask that we will be put in condition by the 1st of August to lay in your hands what I have, under the advise of Gen. Davidson, year by year as we have made this fight, refused to allow any more convicts than was requisite to show good faith on the part of the State to be procured to work on this road until the money was in sight.

Nearly forty of the best men in Asheville, not for personal profit, are backing this work to keep it intact until a Construction Company that has been agreed on to succeed the one who had the misfortune to lose both its President and its Vice President and General Manager, and its chief European Council within a period of ninety days. And there is hanging some legal points between the adjustment of the estates of the old Construction Company, and the new one that is organizing in Europe that we are responsible for some of the delays because we will not agree to any adjustment that would involve the State for another penny than what is coming through that little bunch of convicts, until we first have laid in your hands the papers that are now being finished as fast as the Lawyers from five Nations can complete the work. We are demanding that they not only have signed-up subscriptions, but these subscriptions to be proven financially sound and legally binding, obligating that this money shall be ready and available to push the road to completion when you and the Council of State shall have said these money contracts are good. A work like this cannot be rushed when Twenty Millions of Dollars have got to be pledged to come into this State under those conditions.

It would not be only unjust to us men in Western Carolina that have given our work and time free for over seven years, and put up our good money, expecting only its return, and unjust to those men we have induced to put up what with our money, will equal, if not exceed, a half million of dollars, which is more than the cost of time consumed by the two sessions of the Legislature and the costly litigations prosecuted by the State to stop the rate discrimination.

Our money has been put up to free Western Carolina and the State with just as good faith as any dollar the State has ever expended, or will ever expend in this freight rate discrimination battle, and done with the same zeal and determined purpose that your excellency is manifesting in the efforts that you are making to accomplish the same thing that we have spent one dollar in money to every ten cents in money and time that the State Legislature and its employees have given direct to this work.

So these humiliating statements, going in about us by well intended men, that know nothing on earth from the officials of this Company of its actual purposes and what it is doing, would kill the confidence of foreign capital that we are winning the second time what was lost by the action of men that wouldn't study, or read, enough, and some of them men that have got the highest positions in the national government out of this State, to know the nature and character of the fight, a number of the very best men in this whole State have been putting up their money to win, and even doing it this very day and hour. Five of as good men as there are in North Carolina, in this City have indorsed paper today to raise the money to keep clean the hands of this Railroad Company, because they are convinced it will win if the powers of the State are faithful to their efforts and do not interfere.

To bring Twenty Millions of foreign capital to this State, and they to understand specifically that their capital is coming here for the purpose of fighting the railroads in this State, to relieve this State from a Fifteen Million Dollar annual discrimination cannot be driven, nor hurried.

It takes men of long foresight; men that have had experience; men of endurance and patience, to even suggest to a lot of his fellow-men the undertaking of such a work. And, in our belief, it is very nearly accomplished to a degree that it cannot be defeated, save by the infidelity of men who have the power to push it forward, or hurl it to destruction.

So, I trust your Excellency will find some way to prevent interference with this work.

General Davidson has known me every hour I have lived in this State. It took me a long time to convince him, just one man, what was the matter in this rate trouble; and he now understands it, and many others understand it, and I am convinced that he knows now that I knew what I was doing when we began this work, when he only thought it was a vision that might possibly materialize; and I know that he knows now that I know what I am doing.

And I am sure, if you will look the list of the men over who are standing with me in this fight, that there is not one of them connected with this Railroad Company but what has the very best interest of this State at heart; and not one of them, that before he would commit an act that would wrong the State for convicts, or anything else, would go down into their pockets, as they have been doing for over seven years to carry on this work, until success can be reached, and pay every penny back to the State it has cost to support the little bunch of convicts for the time they have been on this road.

And, my dear Governor, I wish yo impress on your mind that any such interference with this work, as suggested by your Superintendent at this time, or the Council of State would everlastingly destroy what you say that you hope from the bottom of your heart will be a success. Our entire Board will come to Raleigh to be investigated by you and the Council of State at any time you may desire; but, I think, if our work is let alone until the 1st of August, there will be somebody else to investigate instead of us.

As to my capability and knowledge of these things that I am talking about, my record is as easily found and as wide open as the noon day's son, and I've given to North Carolina, as thousands and thousands of my friends know, a work and an experience that she couldn't buy for twice the cost that would long ago have given her the relief she is seeking.