Review of the Practical Tourist. 215 



crop for the inhabitants, who gather the locks of cotton with no other 

 labor than that of the harvest. In more northerly latitudes, it be- 

 comes dwindled into an annual plant, requiring careful tillage, and 

 the vigilant attention of the cultivator during the seed time, as well 

 as the harvest. The product of the cotton plant seems to vary in 

 quality from local peculiarities of heat and moisture ; as that with the 

 black seed, which is raised in the vicinity of the ocean on the sea 

 islands of Georgia, loses its superior excellence of staple when trans- 

 planted to the interior country. 



" In the early stages of the cotton manufacture in England, the 

 supply of the raw material was derived from the countries of Asia 

 bordering on the Mediterranean, and from the West Indies. In 1705, 

 it appears that only one million one hundred and seventy thousand 

 pounds of cotton were imported into England; and in 1775, at the 

 period of the commencement of the inventions to which we have 

 been alluding, only four million seven hundred and sixty four thou- 

 sand pounds were imported. Fifty years after this, eight hundred 

 and twenty thousand bags were landed in Great Britain in one year. 

 About seventy two thousand of these having been re-exported, there 

 remained seven hundred and forty eight thousand bags of cotton to 

 supply the annual consumption of this single island. Of this vast 

 quantity, the greater part was brought from a remote country (the 

 United States) where in 1784 not a single bag of cotton was produ- 

 ced as an article of export. 



" In 1785 it was ascertained by the English custom house officers 

 at Liverpool, that an American ship had discharged upon the quay 

 eight bales of cotton, which being then an article of import never be- 

 fore brought from any part of the Uunited States, were seized, upon 

 the supposition that they had been brought circuitously from some of 

 the English West India Islands, contrary to the rigid navigation laws, 

 designed to encourage British shipping. For several years subse- 

 quent to this period, the culture of cotton was neglected in the Uni- 

 ted States, on account of the great labor required to free it of its 

 seeds and motes by manual labor ; but the invention (by the late 

 Eli Whitney,) of the cotton gin, for cleaning the raw cotton, gave in 

 1793 a new impulse to the culture in the United States, quite as 

 great as that given to the manufacture of the same staple material by 

 the inventions of Arkwright. 



The following table of the comparative rates of wages in England, 

 France and the United States furnishes the best information on the 

 subject that we have seen. 



