COTTON 831 



great crop of the world for which Nature has pro- 

 vided no substitute; the basis of a commerce whose 

 influence is measured only by the rising tide of 

 enlightenment and whose condition is the ther- 

 mometer of civilization; the crop which, when 

 properly handled, is of all our crops the one least 

 exhaustive of the land's fertility, and which yields 

 a seed that would in itself make cotton worth 

 cultivating if it had no Fleece of Gold to keep its 

 tens of thousands of modern Argonauts upon our 

 every sea; yielding the richest of cattle feeds, it will 

 yet dot the hills and valleys of the South with a 

 million flocks and herds, and so restore our fam- 

 ished "old fields" to virgin richness and beauty; 

 our manufacture of cotton, now only begun, will 

 also grow in the Piedmont South until the hum of 

 our spindles shall be heard as far as those of 

 England herself ; and the Panama Canal will soon for 

 the first time open full the doors of the Orient to our 

 commerce, and Southern industry will throb afresh, 

 as if new blood had been poured into its veins. 

 Then, indeed, shall we have a section sunny in 

 climate, in people, in prospects; we shall add to 

 the chivalry .and courage of the Old South the 

 progress and prosperity of the New and in the 

 coming literary awakening, some more gifted 

 author will at last write the real Epic of the Cotton, 

 and in American letters the South's own snowy 

 fields will become as famous as New England's 

 gifted sons and daughters have made the ice fields 

 of the colder North. 



