MANUFACTURES. 587 



freight and insurance are probably far from being the largest items. 

 There are the commissions for buying and selling, often more than once; 

 the charges for hauling, weighing, storage, drayage, wharfage, compress- 

 ing, mending ; the loss by shrinkage of various sorts, by sampling, by 

 damage from dirt and damp during transportation, by injury in com- 

 pressing, by stealage, by the deduction of a heavy tare, which is heavily 

 discounted b}^ the foreign purchaser, and which, fall as it may at first on 

 the producer, is paid finally by the consumer of cotton goods. Then there 

 is other tribute paid in various forms to the vast army of middlemen who 

 exact every iota the material will bear during its passage between the 

 planter and the manufacturer. And above all these, the robber hordes 

 of speculators, increasing daily in numbers, hover over the trade for the 

 opportunity to plunder it affords. To illustrate the confusion worse 

 confounded with which this last named class involve those transactions, 

 it is sufficient to mention that the speculations in 1881-82 caused the 

 price of American cotton to be lower during the whole year in Liverpool 

 than it Avas to American spinners, and that with a nearly uniform supply 

 and demand the price was forced up three cents per pound, or thirty per 

 cent., in the summer of 1882. Water can not be made to run up hill 

 without much work, and this reversal of the natural order of things in 

 the cotton market could have been effected only at immense cost. And 

 this much is certain, that whoever might pay for it, or gain by it in the 

 first instance, ultimately it must all be charged in the cost of cotton goods, 

 and operate as an obstacle in the development of this trade. The cotton 

 mills in Carolina find it largely to their interest to purchase directly 

 from the farmers, and several find it profitable to have gins for cleaning 

 the seed cotton, which they afterwards purchase for their own consump- 

 tion. 



In the matter of wages the advantage is once more with South Caro- 

 lina. And this arises partly from the very nature of things, for in a 

 genial and healthful climate like this, human life being easier, must, 

 under other like conditions, be more abundant. The labor, too, has many 

 admirable characteristics in addition to its cheapness. The Anglo-Saxon 

 population here, anxious to escape from field labor, possesses all the 

 intelligence and good qualities exhibited by that race wherever it has 

 been Americanized, beside being, as yet at least, unaffected by those 

 Communistic notions that have interfered so profoundly with the effect- 

 iveness of such labor in many places. If a greater extension of manu- 

 facturing operations should make larger demands for labor than the 

 native white population of the State could supply, besides the induce- 

 ments such a state of things would hold out to immigrants, there is the 

 negro population, which, as the whites passed on to the higher operations 



