HISTORY OF THE COTTON GIN. 319 



ment, or the violence of passion. His cheerful application to 

 new fields of enterprise ; his ready and generous forwardness 

 to serve his friends, his country, and his race, with no pros- 

 pect of return, and the courteous hospitality with which he 

 received and returned the warm esteem of gentlemen from all 

 parts of the Union, as well as the fact that this esteem was so 

 lavishly bestowed upon him all show that his views of this 

 subject were neither morbid nor selfish. When, therefore, he 

 said, as he did deliberately, that he "felt that his just claims 

 on the cotton-growing States, especially on those that had 

 made him no returns for this invention, so important to this 

 country, were still unsatisfied, and that both justice and honor 

 required that compensation should be made" we should feel 

 assured that his testimony but expressed the truth in the 

 case if all the particulars which we have enumerated did not 

 both suggest and confirm the same conclusion. 



It is not necessary to go at lenghth into the reasons of his 

 failure to receive the just compensation for his eminent ser- 

 vices. Many can be imagined in the then infant state of the 

 country, and the unsettled judgments of men in regard to the 

 rights of discoverers, and the unequal action of patents, and 

 in their jealous opposition to monopolies, without supposing a 

 decided and deliberate purpose to defraud or wrong a man 

 from whom the gotton-growers had received their all. We are 

 quite certain that the State of Georgia, at this moment, would 

 be as for from such injustice as any other in the Union. And 

 if the question were presented to her now, whether she owed 

 no debt to the inventor, she could not, in the view of her 

 whitening cotton fields, and in the hearing of the noise of lier 

 own cotton mills, but generously acknowledge the obligation. 

 It is not, however, an obligation for any one State. The 

 whole Union is too much indebted to the great invention to 

 be content to leave the obligation to be cancelled by any one 



