504 ' MANUFACTURES. 



nDtmalcis diie largely, per'ia )s, to the ronobea3"i-5 of iniiiafa':;tiirer3 

 from the producers of cotton, and to the large intervening class of buy- 

 ers, sellers, and speculators, and middlemen, who prosper more by 

 " rendering darkness visible " than by revealing the interest of these two 

 great classes of laborers, in their true light. The following extract from 

 a letter of a large manufacturer of cotton goods will illustrate this. 

 Speaking of his former experience of sixteen years in selling Florida long 

 staple cotton, he says : " Some of it was saw ginned and some of it was 

 roller ginned. The roller gin retained all of the trash, and a good many 

 of the seed. The saw ginned was free of seed, and in every way cleaner 

 than that ginned on the roller gin. Still that- ginned on the roller gin 

 sold for five cents to six cents per pound the highest. I argued the point 

 with the buyers, affirming that the saw ginned was hot cut, and was 

 really the most valuable, on account of the freedom from seed and trash, 

 and proved it to them. Their only reply was, ' I think you are right, 

 but my orders are to pay so much for that ginned on the roller,' and 

 they acted as per orders. I wrote to my customers these facts. Their 

 objection to the roller was that it was too slow, and they fell on the plan 

 of using the saw gin, and after ginning to pass the lint through a whip- 

 per. The whipper gave it the appearance of having been ginned on the 

 roller gin (except the seed and trash), and buyers took it as roller ginned, 

 and paid a higher price for it." 



The statement above given in the table regarding the gin houses in 

 South Carolina includes buildings, gins, feeders and condensers, and the 

 presses used for baling the cotton. These are mostly hand lever presses. 

 They are not so powerful as the old wooden pin screw, moved by horses 

 attached to levers thirty feet in length. The result is that, while the 

 average Aveight of the bale has increased from 350 pounds to 450 pounds 

 and 500 pounds, it has increased also in size in about the same propor- 

 tion. So that the average bale now occupies about thirty-seven cubic 

 feet of space. At the shipping ports the size is reduced b}^ placing it 

 under a powerful and costly hydraulic compress, which crushes it into 

 about seven cubic feet, an operation that by no means improves the 

 quality of the staple ; removed from the repress the bale swells up, be- 

 coming rounded in form, so that when packed in layers above each other 

 they actually occupy, counting the spaces between the rounded sides, 

 nearly twenty cubic feet each. The Dederick perpetual press in use at a 

 few gin houses apparently removes all these difficulties. It compresses 

 the original package, with the power in use and less hand labor, into 

 square bales of such density that from twelve to fourteen tons, according 

 to the power of the press used, may l)e put into a grain car. The bales 

 are compressed in sections, a section at a time, so that no portion is sub- 



