A HUNDRED YEAES' PKOGEESS. 295 



ton bad been raised in our Southern States previous to 1793, when Eli 

 Wliituey invented the cotton-gin. Up to that time tlie difficulty of 

 freeing tlie cotton from the seed had been such that one hand coukl 

 clean but a pound a day, and even at the high price of 25 or 30 cents a 

 pound it could not be made profitable. Ey Whitney'sinvention a hand, 

 instead of one pound, could clean 300 pounds a day. At about the 

 same time steam was introduced as a motive-power in England, and 

 that, with the great improvements in carding and spinning, enabled 

 one man to do the work which it had previously required 2,200 men to 

 do, in the same time, by the old methods. Machinery had introduced 

 an entirely new condition of things. The effect of it was to produce a 

 vital change in the state of affairs at the South, and cotton-growing 

 very rapidly grew up to immense importance, constituting about a 

 third i^art of the whole exports of the country. Each decade showed 

 an increase of about 100 per cent, in production, till, in 1840, it had 

 reached 744,000,000 pounds, six times the product of 1820. The quantity 

 of cotton exported in 1792 was only 138,328 pounds. The quantity ex- 

 ported in 1800 was 1,705,115,735 j)ounds, or 4,412,789 bales of 400 

 pounds each, but the quantity produced in 18G0 was 2,079,230,800 

 pounds, or 5,198,077 bales. This production had fallen off* somewhat 

 in 1870, when the quantity produced was reported as 3,011,990 bales, or 

 1,204,798,400 pounds. 



The hay-crop of the country has also grown up almost entirely within 

 the last hundred years, and considering the necessity that exists 

 throughout all the northern i^ortions of our territory for stall-feeding 

 all stock from three to six months of the year, it has an importance 

 there which it cannot have farther south. It has been asserted that 

 the hay-crop, instead of forming a legitimate part of our national agri- 

 cultural production, and going to swell the aggregate of its money- 

 value, ought rather to be regarded as a tax imposed by the severity of 

 the climate — a tax involving a vast amount of labor and time and 

 money to which the farmer in our milder latitudes is not subjected. 

 There may be some shadow of truth in this view of the case, and yet, 

 like all other apparent hardships, it has its compensations, as the his- 

 tory of the various parts of our country abundantly demonstrates. 



There is scarcely anything which a person who has become accus- 

 tomed to the fine close carpet of green with which nature covers every 

 hill-side and every landscape in our northern sections, would dispense 

 with so reluctantly as the green turf of our natural grasses. But the 

 greatest compensation to be found is the facility which the production 

 of grass and hay gives for keeping up and increasing the fertility of 

 our lands. The system of stall-feeding, for which the making of hay is 

 designed to provide, is the only system by which a constantly improving 

 mixed husbandry can be sustained ; and the want of it may be assigned 

 as the true cause of the exhaustion of the lands of Virginia under the 

 constant culture of tobacco. The only substitute for it is the soiling 

 system, and that becomes impracticable of general application in a coun- 

 try where pasturage and browsing are abundant and cheap. 



The artificial production of hay is entirely of modern origin, as I have 

 shown, but within the last quarter of a century it has increased with 

 great rapidity, especially since the introduction of the numerous labor- 

 saving machines has put it in our power to cut and cure our grasses so 

 quickly and so cheaply. At the time of the first appearance of this product 

 in our national census of 1840, the yield of the entire country was but 

 10,250,000 tons, and it had increased in 1850 to only 13,838,642 tons. 

 But in 18G0 we cut and cured over 19,000,000 tons, while in 3870 the 



