COTTON CULTURE. 101 



First. The class of labor that has hitherto been ap- 

 plied to cotton raising, was, in the last degree, rude and 

 unskilled. Science and judgment on the part of a proprie- 

 tor or agent is of little avail, unless the hand that does 

 the work is guided by a thinking brain. 



Second. On account of the opening of vast and still 

 vaster regions blessed with a virgin and inexhaustible soil 

 in the Southwest, which could be obtained at almost nomi- 

 nal prices, there was no necessity for a system of culture 

 in the older States that should keep the land in undimin- 

 ished productiveness. Why should the cotton grower on 

 the old red lands of the Carolinas and Georgia labor to 

 redeem his acres from the effects of past errors, fill the 

 deep gulches, prevent washing, exterminate the sedge 

 grass and the stunted pine and black oak bushes, and re- 

 store the potash, lime and phosphorus drained from the 

 soil by long cropping without fertilizers, when a few hun- 

 dred miles to the Southwest lay those wide savannahs and 

 broad alluvial bottoms, teeming with tropical luxuriance, 

 to which the Government would give him a fee simple for 

 a dollar and a quarter an acre ? 



Third. Cotton is not a rapid exhauster of any soil. 

 Compare for amount of mineral and organic matter re- 

 moved from the soil, the potato crop with the cotton crop. 

 The stalks of cotton and of potatoes are alike returned to 

 the soil. An acre in potatoes yields, in tubers, say ten 

 thousand pounds weight, which is wholly removed. Three- 

 fourths of this is water, leaving twenty-five hundred 

 pounds dry and mineral matter. In cotton, the same acre 

 would yield a bale, or four hundred pounds of lint. The 

 weight of the dry seed would be about three times that 

 of the lint, that is, twelve hundred pounds. Add the 

 weight of the lint, and the sum is sixteen hundred pounds. 

 Thus, compared with the potato, the removal is as sixteen 

 to twenty-five. 



But in the rudest agriculture ever practiced on cotton 



