of cultivation, may be
found their own condemnation.

Dr. Cloud, of Alabama, editor of the '_Cotton Plant_,' mourning the want
of pasturage in his own State, writes thus: 'Our climate is remarkably
favorable to rich and luxuriant pasturage. The red man of the forest and
the pioneer white man that came here in advance of our _scratching
plow_, tell us they found the wild oat and native grasses waving thick,
as high as a man's head, and so entwined with the wild pea-vine as to
make it difficult to ride among it, all over this country. Every cotton
planter has heard of these fine primitive pasture ranges, and many have
seen them. _If the country or the climate has been cursed in our
appearance as planters here, it has been in the wasting system, that we
introduced and continue to practice_.'

Gov. Wise, in an address upon the agriculture of Virginia, condenses the
whole case in an epigram,--' The negroes skin the land, and the white
men skin the negroes.'

The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the
plantation force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but
the whole available force is insufficient, and large quantities are
lost. The policy of the planters being to buy out the small landholders
in their neighborhood, they have no extra force upon which to draw.
Olmsted says: 'I much doubt if the harvest demand of the principal
cotton districts of Mississippi adds five per cent. to their field-hand
force. I observed the advantage of the free-labor system exemplified in
Western Texas, the cotton-fields in the vicinity of the German village
of New Braunfils having been picked far closer than any I had before
seen,--in fact perfectly clean. One woman was pointed out to me who had,
in the first year she had seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a
day than any slave in the county.'

'Substitute the French system (that of small allotment or
_parcellement_) for the Mississippi system in cotton-growing, and who
can doubt that the cotton supply of the United States would be greatly
increased?'

Dr. Cloud, the most intelligent writer upon cotton cultivation I have
been able to find, is urgent in his advice to manure the land, practice
rotation of crops, and produce larger crops upon fewer acres. But the
universal practice is precisely the reverse; the process of exhaustion
is followed year after year; cotton is planted year after year; the
seed--which Northern men would cultivate for oil al