THE AMERICAN WOOD-PAPER COMPANY. 481 
producing 133,000 dols. worth of paper. In 1787 the business comman- 
ded sixty-three mills, and required 250,000 dols. worth of paper. In 
1786 it required fifty-three mills to supply Philadelphia with Gab and 
Scribble stuff (many gatherings of Congressmen, Conventions, young 
statesmen and juvenile Pub. Docs., in those days, at Philadelphia), the 
demand absorbing 71,000 reams. In 1840 there were 426 mills, with a 
capital of 4,745,239 dols., and an annual product of 6,173,092 dols. In 
1850, 443 mills ; capital, 7,266,844 dols. ; annual product, 10,187,177 
dols. ; in 1860, 500 mills ; capital 10,000,000 ; annual product 
21,000,000 — being in the printing and publishing year of peace, 1860. 
Total, 60,000 tons of paper, or about 2,800,000 reams ; or, to be minute, 
over thirteen thousand two hundred million sheets. From 700,000 
annual sheets, as the labour of honest William Eyttinghuisen, to more 
than thirteen thousand million, the work of this great Yankee nation. 
This is the story of the American paper trade in a sentence. 
In time, as all the world began to read and write, the problem came 
to the minds of good men : — How can we hope to keep this vast demand 
so fully supplied that paper shall be cheap, and literature open to the 
poor— that the farmer may eventually have his Bible for a shilling and 
his weekly paper for a dollar a year. Kags were wanted. Who shall 
write the lyric of the great rag hunt of the last four years ? "Even to 
Japan," said one papermaker to day — " all the world and Japan have 
been scoured for rags that Yankee people may read and write." The 
failure of the cotton crop, through war, increased the rag famine, white 
paper rising — 50, 75, 100 per cent. — until timid men began to fear that 
a return to vellum and palimpsest, Was all that remained. All sorts of 
contrivances were made. The problem was perplexing. Wanted first, 
a good substance that had fibre and body and could hold together. 
Wanted second, a substance that was cheap, abundant, inexhaustible, 
easy of supply, so that transportation and travel and foreign labour 
would not destroy its value. Cheap paper means cheap reading — cheap 
reading, national virtue. Industry and science had found ingenious 
mechanism capable of printing all the books of the world over again — 
where was the paper ? 
That is the problem now ! We have tried a hundred substances — 
all good — but not answering every requirement of the problem. The 
rag — the best element of paper — has for years become more and more 
contracted in supply, while cotton waste and rope waste are so necessarily. 
Straw is a good agent, but we want a better one. Behold on these 
plains the tall poplar tree — the pretentious, unwelcome, unnecessary 
poplar — of little use in farm economy — to be cut down as cumbering 
the ground some day, perhaps. Stop ! We will try this tall poplar tree 
in the American Wood- and Pulp Works and see what hidden virtues it 
may possess. This is the experiment which has brought me to Phila- 
delphia — which has kept me on the banks of the Schuylkill River these 
