COTTON 
331 
great crop of the world for which Nature has pro- 
vided no substitute; the basis of a commerce whose 
influence is measured only by the rising tide of 
enlightenment and whose condition is the ther- 
mometer of civilization; the crop which, when 
properly handled, is of all our crops the one least 
exhaustive of the land's fertility, and which yields 
a seed that would in itself make cotton worth 
cultivating if it had no Fleece of Gold to keep its 
tens of thousands of modern Argonauts upon our 
every sea; yielding the richest of cattle feeds, it will 
yet dot the hills and valleys of the South with a 
million flocks and herds, and so restore our fam- 
ished "old fields" to virgin richness and beauty; 
our manufacture of cotton, now only begun, will 
also grow in the Piedmont South until the hum of 
our spindles shall be heard as far as those of 
England herself ; and the Panama Canal will soon for 
the first time open full the doors of the Orient to our 
commerce, and Southern industry will throb afresh, 
as if new blood had been poured into its veins. 
Then, indeed, shall we have a section sunny in 
climate, in people, in prospects; we shall add to 
the chivalry and courage of the Old South the 
progress and prosperity of the New — and in the 
coming literary awakening, some more gifted 
author will at last write the real Epic of the Cotton, 
and in American letters the South' s own snowy 
fields will become as famous as New England's 
gifted sons and daughters have made the ice fields 
of the colder North. 
