No. 149.] 405 



avails himself of. I mean the slender weed called the " flax 

 dodd," which engrafts itself in the stem, and injures both fibre 

 and seed. This was in the flax of Riga, Holland, &c,, while we 

 had it not. Our seed was, therefore best ; so that any quality of 

 which we then carried to England was welcome, which has since 

 been countervailed, and the trade is gone. McCulloch, in 1838, 

 said that England spun a flax-thread out of one pound of the fi- 

 bre, to the length of 11,170 yards, while in 1814, it had been 

 spun but 3,330 yards. The liner thread goes to Brussels and 

 Paris, to make lace and fine work. In like manner, iron, when 

 manufactured into hair-springs for watches, yields a value of 

 1250,000 from one pound of iron, worth ten cents. Such are the 

 immeasurable advantages of skill and workmanship over and 

 above the humble raw material. It is our business to supplant 

 her in all this work here at home. To protect her labor she re- 

 sorted to cruel punishments, in order to prevent the export of 

 any raw material which could be made more valuable by the art 

 or. industry of her own people. For the export of a fleece of 

 wool, her statutes ordered the victim of tliis policy to imprison- 

 ment or the pillory for the first offence ; to lose the right hand 

 for the second ; and to the gallows for a third. I hope and trust 

 that it never will be our lot to imitate her in such enactments. 



Besides an appeal to the powers of chemistry in relation to flax, 

 we call for powerful and thorough microscopic examination. It is 

 said that the stems are covered with minute scales — that the fi- 

 bre is round, is joined by gluten, and is formed of separate parts, 

 about as long as the fibre of cotton, lapped one on another; and 

 it is believed that these may be separated, so that then they can 

 be perfectly well spun by our present cotton mills. Let all this 

 be searched out. If success should reward our labor, then shall 

 we be in possession of a fabric worth a thousand times more than 

 silk, giving a beautiful, strong, and smooth dress for all mankind, 

 at the low price of cotton goods, Avhich must then take a second 

 rank, and thereby, with a staple universal in its production, ren- 

 der us independent in all circumstances. 



In the cultivation of flax, weeds have been found to grow up 

 with it in some regions, thus requiring the planter to go upon his 



