increased in the Southern States. It has been the design
of the slaveholders to keep the poor white men in ignorance. There,
neighbors are miles apart. There are vast tracts of land where the
solitude is unbroken by the sounds of labor. Schools and newspapers
cannot flourish. Information is given by word of mouth. Men are
influenced to political action by the arguments and stories of
stump-speakers, and not by reading newspapers. They vote as they are
told, or as they are influenced by the stories they hear. So, when the
leading conspirators were ready to bring about the rebellion, being in
possession of the State governments, holding official positions, by
misrepresentation, cunning, and wickedness, they were able to delude the
ignorant poor men, and induce them to vote to secede from the Union.

Two thousand years ago the natives of India manufactured cloth from the
fibres of the cotton-plant, which grew wild in the woods. The old
historian, Herodotus, says that the trees bore fleeces as white as snow.
A planter of South Carolina obtained some of the seeds, and began to
cultivate the plant. In 1748 ten bags of cotton were shipped to
Liverpool, but cotton-spinning had not then begun in England. In 1784
the custom-house officers at Liverpool seized eight bags which a planter
had sent over, on the ground that it was not possible to raise so much
in America. The manufacture of cotton goods was just then commencing in
England, and cotton was in demand. The plant grew luxuriantly in the
sunny fields of the South, but it was a day's work for a negro to
separate the seed from a pound, and the planters despaired of making it
a profitable crop.

A few years before the Liverpool custom-house officers seized the eight
bags, a boy named Eli Whitney was attending school in Westboro',
Massachusetts, who was destined to help the planters out of the
difficulty. He made water-wheels, which plashed in the roadside brooks,
and windmills, which whirled upon his father's barn. He made violins,
which were the wonder and admiration of all musicians. He set up a shop,
and made nails by machinery, and thus earned money through the
Revolutionary War. When not more than twelve years old, he stayed at
home from meeting one Sunday alone, and took his father's watch to
pieces, and put it together again so nicely that it went as well as
ever. It was not the proper business for Sunday, however.

When a young man, he went South to teach school. He h