COTTON CtJLTTJRE. 165 



permit the continuance for a great length of time of such 

 a state of things. One great effect of the recent radical 

 changes in Southern society has been the opening of the 

 cotton fields of the South to the labor of all races, instead 

 of their being restricted to the labor of one, and in giving 

 scope to every class of industrial enterprises and to varied 

 forms of organized labor. Up to the year 1860 there was, 

 practically, but one way of raising cotton, but one class 

 of persons who performed the labor, and but a single and 

 unvarying system for applying that labor to the soil. 

 Now those lands can be and are likely to be possessed and 

 tilled, in many instances by large joint stock companies, 

 whose operations extend over an area of perhaps twenty 

 thousand acres, and whose business reaches annually to 

 hundreds of thousands of dollars. Enterprises like this 

 were impracticable and unknown under the former system. 

 Very large amounts of cotton, greater, perhaps, than by 

 any other method, will be grown, as grass and wheat and 

 corn are produced, in the Northern and North-western 

 States, by the labor of the land-owner himself, who, with 

 the aid of one or two assistants in summer, cultivates the 

 forty, sixty, or eighty acres of which he holds the fee 

 simple. There will be opportunities, also, for the success- 

 ful application of another class of labor to the cultivation 

 of this crop ; the owners of those large tracts of from 

 three hundred to three and four thousand acres, having no 

 means of cultivating such a breadth, will be very willing 

 to rent it to any industrious person who, without capital, 

 has a disposition to work, and the proprietor -will receive 

 his pay in a share of the crop raised. As soon as the 

 composure of society is such as to give ample security to 

 both life and property, and such is believed to be the case 

 by the Northern and European States, there must be a 

 large influx of both population and wealth into the cotton 

 region. These accessions to society then will naturally be 

 divided into three general classes. 



