COTTON CTTLTUBE. 179 



returned, and the cotton farm growing richer instead of 

 poorer year by year. With increasing population manu- 

 factures will multiply, and most of the coarser fabrics be 

 woven within sight of the field where the staple grows. 

 Many years will elapse before the finer fabrics can be pro- 

 duced as successfully as they can be in the great mills of 

 Manchester and Lowell. 



The experience of the world, since the outbreak of our 

 civil war, has established the great superiority of North 

 America as the cotton growing region of the globe. The 

 sceptre of King Cotton is not broken ; it has merely 

 shifted hands. 



The possible future of cotton culture, as compared with 

 the past, may be seen from the fact, that of all this vast 

 region which has been so minutely described, only a very 

 small fractional part has ever been converted into cotton 

 fields. There are sixty-four squares on a checker-board. 

 Xow suppose the cotton belt to be that checker-board, and 

 the fields actually planted in cotton would represent but 

 one square, that is, one sixty-fourth part only of the " cot- 

 ton fields of America " are, properly speaking, cotton fields. 



This statement will give a clearer conception than any 

 figures of the comparative infancy of cotton culture in the 

 United States. The sheep from whose fleeces mankind 

 derive their warmest clothing, dot ten thousand hill-sides 

 in all the temperate regions of the earth. The Silk- worm, 

 from whose golden cocoon man makes his costliest fabric, 

 is confined to no zone or belt. But for the material of our 

 cheapest cloth the world looks to America. And here 

 millions of acres of virgin and inexhaustible soil await the 

 onward march of the grand army of labor, that shall level 

 the forests, turn the prairie sod, plant, cultivate and gather 

 the crop whose snowy fibre, twisted by billions of spindles, 



Shall FORM THE CLOTHING OF THE RACE. 



