the land; and judged
by export values, as estimated by the specialist Dabney, at
one time Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, cotton is still
king of the American market.

The growth of the cotton industry in the United States,
traced so minutely by Handy, witnesses from one decade to
another to the supreme achievement of the American inventor
so highly estimated by Macaulay. Eli Whitney was born at
Westboro, Massachusetts, in 1765, and died in 1825. In 1792
he was graduated at Yale College, and that year became a
teacher in Georgia, where he invented the cotton-gin. Before
he could secure a patent his machine was stolen from his
workshop, and others reaped the profits of his ingenuity. It
is pleasing to know that he afterward made a fortune by
other uses of his inventive skill. His service to the cotton
industry in all its departments has not only been vastly
influential in the development of his own country, but has
also greatly affected the relations of the United States
with other industrial nations, especially with Great
Britain, the leading cotton-manufacturing country of the
world.

CHARLES W. DABNEY

Cotton is the principal product of eight great States of the American
Union, and the most valuable "money crop" of the entire country.
Climatic conditions practically restrict its cultivation to a group of
States constituting less than one-fourth of the total area of the
country, and yet the value of the annual crop is exceeded among
cultivated products only by corn, which is grown in every State of the
Union, and occasionally by wheat. Cotton furnishes the raw material for
one of our most important manufacturing industries and from one-fourth
to one-third of our total exports.

Considered without reference to any particular country, its economic
importance is far beyond numerical expression; for while the total crop
of the world is approximately ascertainable, the effect of cotton upon
the commercial and social relations of mankind is too far-reaching for
estimation. Of the four great staples that provide man with
clothing--cotton, silk, wool, and flax--cotton, by reason of its
cheapness and its many excellencies, is rapidly superseding its several
rivals. Sixty years ago only about two million five hundred thousand
bales of cotton, or less than the present production of Texas, were
annually converted into c