318 COTTON PLANTER'S MANUAL. 



same success, in their vigorous, though infant enterprises; the 

 busy troops of operators whom they pay, and the neighbor- 

 ing farmers who find a ready market for their produce, all 

 owe it to the same genius, that they have the material art, 

 of which to bring these larger or humbler returns. All that 

 prosperity, too, which results from the combined and har- 

 monious working of the producing, the commercial, and the 

 manufacturing interests, as far as these interests have been 

 dependent on the cultivation of cotton, has received its im 

 pulse from this invention, and owes its acknowledgment to 

 Eli Whitney. 



We have seen what Whitney has given to his country. 

 The question is very natural, what has he received jfrora that 

 country ? It was his own testimony, as asserted by an inti- 

 mate friend, Professor Silliman, and that testimony was given 

 in his hearing near the close of life, that the disease, which 

 cut short his life, was brought on by exposure and fatigue 

 during the last of his land journeys, to assert his just claims 

 so long injuriously frustrated. He received then, first of all, 

 the termination of his life in the midst of those domestic en- 

 joyments which had been so long deferred in consequence of 

 the delay of his just rights, and in the possession of that for- 

 tune, the acquisition of which he had been forced to put off 

 till the noon of his days. 



So far as a pecuniary return is concerned, he received 

 nothing ; for it was also his dying testimony, that " all he had 

 received for the invention of the cotton gin had not more than 

 compensated him for the enormous expenses which he had 

 incurred, and for the time which he had devoted, during many 

 of the best years of his life, in the prosecution of this subject." 

 On such a subject as this, Mr. Whitney was not likely to 

 exaggerate ; his mind was too self-possessed, and his integrity 

 too uncorrupt to allow him to yield to the glooin of disappoint- 



