lothing; the spindles of the world now use over
thirteen million bales per annum. Yet less than half the people of the
world are supplied with cotton goods made by modern machinery, and it
has been estimated that it would require annually a crop of forty-two
million bales of five hundred pounds each to raise the world's standard
of consumption to that of the principal nations.

Cotton stands preeminent among farm crops in the ease and cheapness of
its production, as compared with the variety and value of its products.
No crop makes so slight a drain upon the fertility of the soil, and for
none has modern enterprise found so many uses for its several parts. The
cotton plant yields, in fact, a double crop--a most beautiful fibre and
a seed yielding both oil and feed, which, although neglected for a long
time, is now esteemed worth one-sixth as much as the fibre. In addition
to this, the stems can be made to yield a fibre which waits only for a
machine to work it, and the roots yield a drug. It is entirely possible,
therefore, that cotton may ultimately be grown as much for these parts
as for the lint.

The history of cotton production in the United States differs from that
of almost every other agricultural product in several important
particulars. For nearly three-quarters of a century slave labor was
almost exclusively employed in this branch of agricultural industry, and
an immense majority of the colored people of to-day look to it for their
chief support. Cotton was also the great pioneer crop in the new
Southwestern States. Not only has the westward movement of the industry
been more rapid than that of any other crop, but the centre of
production has always been farther in advance of the centre of
population. As long ago as 1839 Mississippi was producing almost
one-fourth of the entire crop of the country. Recent years have
witnessed an enormous development in the regions to the west, which
would have carried the centre of production across the Mississippi River
if the cultivation of cotton, unlike that of wheat and corn and other
products, had not taken a new lease of life in the older States along
the Atlantic seaboard, where the use of manures has both extended the
area and increased the production.

Probably no equally great industry was ever more completely paralyzed or
had its future placed in greater jeopardy than cotton growing in the
United States during the war of 1861-1865. So great was the decrease in