28 
COTTON 
covered in this musty volume some extracts from 
the London Economist of 1859 which — except for 
their direct references to slavery; — might well have 
appeared yesterday. The Economist Editor com- 
ments on the fact that Brazil, Egypt and the West 
Indies all grow cotton and might grow more, "but 
as an immediate and practical question of supply, 
it is confined to America and British India." 
To India, however, he looks very hopefully. 
The situation, he says, "invests the subject of 
Indian cotton growing with enormous interest. 
• • • • . In some important respects the 
conditions of supply from India differ very much 
from those which attach to and determine the sup- 
ply from America. In India there is no limit 
to the quantity of labor. There may be said to be 
little or none to the quantity of land. The obstacle 
is of another kind ; it lies almost exclusively in lack 
of cheap transit." Therefore he finds new hopes 
in the "railways which are being constructed . . 
... to bring in the abundant labor of millions 
of our fellow subjects in India to cheapen and in- 
crease the supply of cotton." No English consul 
or cotton manufacturer in our own time has had 
a severer attack of Mulberry Sellers optimism than 
did this Economist writer of fifty years ago. 
"hope springs eternal " 
Writing later in 1859, the Editor of the Econo- 
mist lauded in the highest terms the continued 
efforts to make England independent of Southern 
cotton. "We cannot well conceive of stronger con- 
siderations than those which are moving English- 
men to action in this particular," he says; and this 
time he also lays stress on the opportunities in 
