JUTE-CULTURE. 295 



great centers of industrial art watches, cutlery, agricultural implements, 

 eoarse domestics, and some finer fabrics, cannot win a far greater vic- 

 tory over the unskilled hand-labor of India. It is high time for a gen- 

 eral introduction of the culture of jute in our Southern States. Every 

 step in the progress of naturalization should be attended by intelligent 

 experiment. Tests of every kind of soil and treatment will result in 

 better seeds, a larger yield, a rotation of crops that will be least ex- 

 hausting to the soil, machines for the cheap and rapid removal of the 

 bark of the plant, and processes of steeping that will separate the fiber 

 without destroying its strength, color, or gloss. Then the new enterprise, 

 giving employment to home labor and activity to domestic capital, will 

 quicken the revival of our languishing industries, aid the South in re- 

 gaining its material prosperity, and enrich the nation by the economy of 

 millions which have heretofore been paid to foreign lands. 



