's comforts and conveniences.

Under the second Patent Act came the most important invention yet
offered, an invention which was to affect generations then unborn. This
was a machine for cleaning cotton and it was offered by a young Yankee
schoolmaster, temporarily sojourning in the South.

CHAPTER II. ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GIN

The cotton industry is one of the most ancient. One or more of the many
species of the cotton plant is indigenous to four continents, Asia,
Africa, and the Americas, and the manufacture of the fiber into yarn
and cloth seems to have developed independently in each of them. We find
mention of cotton in India fifteen hundred years before Christ. The East
Indians, with only the crudest machinery, spun yarn and wove cloth as
diaphanous as the best appliances of the present day have been able to
produce.

Alexander the Great introduced the "vegetable wool" into Europe. The
fable of the "vegetable lamb of Tartary" persisted almost down to modern
times. The Moors cultivated cotton in Spain on an extensive scale, but
after their expulsion the industry languished. The East India Company
imported cotton fabrics into England early in the seventeenth century,
and these fabrics made their way in spite of the bitter opposition of
the woolen interests, which were at times strong enough to have the use
of cotton cloth prohibited by law. But when the Manchester spinners
took up the manufacture of cotton, the fight was won. The Manchester
spinners, however, used linen for their warp threads, for without
machinery they could not spin threads sufficiently strong from the
short-fibered Indian cotton.

In the New World the Spanish explorers found cotton and cotton fabrics
in use everywhere. Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Magellan, and others speak
of the various uses to which the fiber was put, and admired the striped
awnings and the colored mantles made by the natives. It seems probable
that cotton was in use in the New World quite as early as in India.

The first English settlers in America found little or no cotton among
the natives. But they soon began to import the fiber from the West
Indies, whence came also the plant itself into the congenial soil and
climate of the Southern colonies. During the colonial period, however,
cotton never became the leading crop, hardly an important crop. Cotton
could be grown profitably only where there was an abundant supply of
exceedingly cheap labor, and labor in Ame