298 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



Journal is exclusively dedicated, and one which by every wise and provident 

 Government should be fostered first, and above all others. 



But for Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin, Arkwrighl's spinning jenny, 

 and other iniprovoments in cotton manufacturing machinery, as well as the whole 

 cotton region of our Union would have been comparatively uncalled for and val- 

 ueless. This ingenious but unfortunate artist, says Seabrook, in his compre- 

 hensive and classical Essay on Cotton, by his machine doubled the wealth and 

 employment of his countrymen; while Judge William Johnson, of South Caro- 

 lina, in deciding one of the numberless suits which Whitney was compelled, 

 with infinite cost and vexation to institute for violation of his patent, declared : 

 " If we should assert that the benefits of this invention exceed $100,000,000, we 

 can prove the assertion by correct calculation." But painful and mortifying 

 would be the task, even if we had room, of enumerating here the piracies and 

 persecutions he encountered. Instead of proving, as such an invention would 

 have done, under any despotism of the Old World, a source of unbounded 

 w-ealth, and title to enduring honors at the hands of the people and the Govern- 

 ment ; it seems, by the fuller narrative before us, to have brought down upon 

 him a series of difficulties, and even of derogatory and groundless suspicions and 

 charges, which remind the reader of the heart-sickening train of calamities that 

 stuck, like the poisoned shirt of Nessus, to the unfortunate discoverer of the 

 philosopher's stone, as related in the celebrated romance of St. Leon. 



So numerous, so protracted, so expensive and harassing, were these suits for 

 violationsof his rights, violations that, especially in Georgia, fovmd too much en- 

 couragement in the selfishness of a community that should have promptly lent 

 him their sympathy and support, that Hon. S. M. Hopkins, a gentleman of 

 much experience in the profession of the law, who was well acquainted with 

 Mr. Whitney's affairs in the South, and sometimes acted as his legal adviser, 

 observes, in a letter, that in all his experience in the thorny profession of the 

 law, he had never seen such a case of perseverance, under such persecution, 

 <'nor," he adds, " do I believe that I ever knew any other man who would have 

 met them with equal coolness and firmness, or who would finally have obtained 

 even the partial success which he did. He always called on me in Kew-Vork 

 on his way South, when going to attend his endless trials, and to meet the mis- 

 chievous contrivances of men who seemed inexhaustible in their resources of 

 evil. Even now, after thirty years, my head aches to recollect his narratives of 

 new trials, fresh disappointments and accumulated wrongs." 



But our limits admonish us to turn from the story of these accumulated 

 wrongs to a useful citizen, which stand out in bolder relief for having been per- 

 petrated under a Government which is said emphatically to be founded on public 

 virtue. 



A Summary of the Stale of Cotton Ilushandry immediately before, as con- 

 trasted ivilh its progress immediately after, and ever since the rnvcntion of the 

 Co</o7i-GiVi, will follow this Memoir. It discloses a development of industrial 

 resources for Avhich we should search in vain for a parallel in the agricultural 

 annals of any nation on the globe ; and never did chick issue from the egg more 

 obviously than this wonderful expansion of American industry from the effect 

 of an invention in suitable reward for which, Eli Whitney, instead of a con- 

 temptible patent, should have received a million of dollars, along with the bene- 

 dictions of his country. How difl'orent the treatment of Cobdkn by the friends 

 of free trade !— a donation already amounting to $750,000 ! When Whitney ni- 



(034) 



