1862.] A Plea for Cotton and for Industry. 523 



the encouragement of the growth of cotton, sugar, and other products, 

 which the labour of the negro in slavery has yielded, then that disgrace- 

 ful traffic in human beings miglit have been annihilated, and our own 

 pursuits untainted with the wrongs inflicted upon the coloured race. 

 Australia, however, has amazing powers for the production of cotton, 

 and in sections of that great country, Queensland, Victoria, and New 

 South Wales, cotton of every class, from the lowest to the highest, might 

 be cultivated and produced beyond the wants of all the world. Queens- 

 land has sent small lots of cotton of unsurpassed beauty and excellence, 

 and from this colony and from New South Wales samples of cotton 

 may be seen in the great International Exhibition of qualities adapted 

 to the production of the finest muslins and laces which any skill could 

 manipulate, as may be seen by this beautiful specimen of lace made from 

 it. Labour appears to be almost alone the sole requisite for obtaining 

 supplies of cotton of incalculable extent from Australia. On referring 

 to the cultivation of cotton in America, we learn that there one million 

 of negroes can produce cotton of nearly twice the extent of its consump- 

 tion in Great Britain, consequently half-a-million of labourers would 

 suffice to produce the cotton needed by the latter, and the question arises 

 whether it would not be an act of prudence and of wisdom to induce this 

 number of Chinese men, women, ami children to become cotton growing 

 labourei"s in Australia. In the States of America only about one quarter 

 of the negro population is there engaged in cotton agriculture, the large 

 majority being employed in producing tobacco, rice, sugar, Indian corn, 

 and in handycraft and domestic pursuits or occupations. The Emperor 

 of France has wisely offered great inducements for the growth of cotton 

 in Algiers, whence very superior cotton is already supplied. That French 

 colony is within a single week's sail of this country, and some eminent 

 men of business here and in France are endeavouring to extend the 

 cultivation of cotton in it, which, if judiciously carried out, cannot fail 

 becoming of vast advantage to all the relations of both countries. 



With these facts the power abundantly to produce cotton, not only 

 in British possessions, but in many foreign states, is beyond all doubt. 

 Cotton may also be profitably as well as abundantly grown, and free 

 labour might be more economically employed than has been the labour 

 of the slave. Great injury has been done in delaying efforts to grow 

 cotton in new fields of cultivation by the unwarrantable assumption that 

 slave labour was so amazingly cheap that free labour could not compete 

 with it. This has been a discouraging delusion, for the labour of the 

 slave has actually, in the cotton states of America, been more costly 

 than the free-skilled labour of Europe, and cotton has not been cultivated 

 in countries capable of growing it, from a false conviction that those 

 American States possessed a monopoly of the means of producing it ; 

 but it is evident that Providence has not designed that this valuable 

 material should be only raised by the bondage of the negro, for, on the 

 contrary, proofs abound that cotton can be adequately and most profit- 

 ably produced in the many countries now mentioned alike with advan- 

 tage to the capitalist and to the free labourer. 



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