418 [Assembly 



one-sixth of that quantity. In my opinion, if flax takes the place 

 of cotton to a great extent, England Avill look to our rich alluvial 

 western lands for her main supply of the raw material. I trust 

 our western agriculturists will take into consideration the im- 

 mense importance of these discoveries in a national point of view, 

 if they believe them all, which I must confess I do not. 



A few days since, at Paterson, New-Jersey, an English gentle- 

 man, carrying on the manufacture of linen, informed me that he 

 had united cotton with flax, and in his attempt had most signally 

 failed, from the fact that cotton and flax are so entirely different 

 in their nature, that they will not receive the dye uniformly, 

 and, therefore, in combination will not produce a fine fabric. 

 Here are two samples prepared by the gentleman in question and 

 presented to me ; the fine, well colored, uniform piece, is made 

 from pure flax ; the light colored, coarse grained piece, is one- 

 third cotton and two-thirds flax. If the English have not been 

 more successful in their attempts, and I do not believe they have, 

 our southern friends have nothing to fear. 



Mr. Scott, the gentleman alluded to, further informed me that 

 a friend of his in England hired three hundred acres of land, for 

 which he paid eight pounds (or forty dollars) per acre — twelve 

 thousand dollars per annum — and raised upon it nothing but flax ; 

 and furthermore, that it paid him. This surprised me ; but when 

 he stated that a manufacturer in Paterson imported his flax from 

 England, and paid there forty dollars per ton for it, my surprise 

 was changed to mortification, to think that a people possessing 

 millions of acres of virgin soil, capable of yielding a crop of flax 

 annually for fifteen years in succession, without manure or other 

 aid, should import flax grown upon foreign soil that had been 

 under cultivation for centuries, and which had to be manured 

 and enriched at great cost to produce anything. 



The increase in the consumption of foreign flax in the Kingdom 

 of Great Britain has been from 936,000 cwt.,in 1831, to 1,800,000 

 cwt. in 1849, and at the present time the spinners are not able to 

 meet the demands for yarn. The value of flax they imported in 

 1849 was more than £4,500,000, and flax seed equal in value to 

 i:i,388,131; oil cake, £644,175; hemp, 45,000 tons, worth 



