The Romance of Industry and Invention Part 4

The fibre of wool varies in diameter, the Saxon merino measuring 1/1370 of an inch, and the Southdown, 1/1100. l.u.s.trous wool, it is said, should be long and strong; but if it is very fine it is not long. Strong wool may be as much as twenty inches in length. The wool of the best sheep adheres closely, and can only be removed by shearing; but there are varieties of sheep which shed their wool, as, for instance, the Persian, which drop the whole of their fleeces between January and May, when feeding on the new gra.s.s.

This, then, is wool, the first use of which for cloth-making is lost in antiquity. There is no doubt that the pastoral industry is the oldest industry in the world; for even when the fruits of the earth could be eaten without tillage and without labour, the flocks and herds required care and attention. The shepherd may be regarded as the earliest pioneer of industry, as he has been for centuries the centre of fanciful romance, and the personification of far from romantic fact. The old legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece is in itself evidence of the antiquity of the knowledge of the value of wool; and much as the mythologists make out of the legend, there are some who hold that it merely is meant to record how the Greeks imported a superior kind of sheep from the Caucasus and made money thereby.

Australia is now the land of the Golden Fleece, and millions of money have been made there out of the docile sheep. It is not indigenous, of course, to the land of the Southern Cross, where the only mammal known when Europeans discovered it was the kangaroo. Mr James Bonwick, a gentleman well known in Australian literature, gathered together many records of the introduction of the sheep into Australia, and of the marvellous development of the pastoral industry there in his very interesting book, _The Romance of the Wool-trade_.

But, first, as to the different kinds of sheep. The Bighorn is the wild-sheep of Kamchatka, and it may be taken for granted that all species of the domestic sheep were at one time wild, or are descended from wild tribes. When the Aryan Hindus invaded India, it is recorded that they took their flocks with them; but whether the wild-sheep still to be found on the hills of Northern India are the descendants of wanderers from these flocks, or descendants of the progenitors of them, we do not pretend to say.

Chief among the domesticated sheep of the British Isles is the Southdown, whose characteristics used to be--although we are told they are changed somewhat now--thin chine, low fore-end, and rising backbone, a small hornless head, speckled face, thin lips, woolled ears, and bright eyes. The wool should 'be short, close, curled, fine, and free from spiry projecting fibres.' Then there are the Romney Marsh, the Cotswold, the Lincoln, the Leicester, and the Hardwick sheep, each with its distinctive marks and value. The Welsh sheep have long necks, high shoulders, narrow b.r.e.a.s.t.s, long bushy tails, and small bones; the wool is not first cla.s.s, but the mutton is excellent. The Irish native sheep are of two kinds, the short-woolled and long-woolled; but Southdowns and Leicesters have been so long crossed with them that their idiosyncrasies are no longer marked. The Shetland sheep are supposed to have come from Denmark, but have also been crossed with English and Scotch varieties.

In Scotland, the Cheviot and the Blackfaced are the two ruling types.

The Cheviot is a very handsome animal, with long body, white face, small projecting eyes, and well-formed legs. The wool is excellent, as the 'tweed'-makers of the Border know, but is not so soft as that of the English Southdowns. The Blackfaced is the familiar form we see in the Highlands, supposed to have come originally 'from abroad,' but now regarded as the native sheep of Scotland. It is a hardy animal, accustomed to rough food and rough weather, with a fine deep chest, broad back, slender legs, attractive face, and picturesque horns. The wool is not so good as that of the Cheviot variety, but the mutton is better. Of course, English varieties have been largely crossed with the two native Scotch kinds; yet these still remain distinct, and are easily recognisable.

As long ago as the time of the Emperor Constantine, the wool of English sheep had a high reputation, and had even then found its way to Rome. Of English monarchs, Edward III. seems to have been the first to endeavour to stimulate the pastoral industry by the manufacture of woollen cloths and the export of raw wool. But Henry VIII. thought that sheep-breeding had been carried too far, and the farmers were making too much money out of it; so he decreed that no one should keep more than two thousand four hundred sheep at one time, and that no man should be allowed to occupy more than two farms. In the time of Charles II. the export of both sheep and wool was strictly prohibited. As late as 1788, there were curious prohibitory enactments with reference to sheep; and the date is interesting, because it was the date of the settlement of New South Wales. There was a fine of three pounds upon the carrying off of any sheep from the British Isles, except for use on board s.h.i.+p; and even between the islands and the mainland of Scotland, or across a tidal river, sheep could not be transported without a special permit and the execution of a bond that the animals were not for exportation. Indeed, no sheep could be shorn within five miles of the sea-coast without the presence of a revenue officer, to see that the law was not evaded.

It is not surprising, then, that the first sheep settled in Australia--the only great pastoral country that has never had a native variety--did not go from England. It is very curious that in Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, where now lies a great portion of the pastoral wealth of the world, there never was any animal in the smallest degree resembling a sheep until some enterprising Britons took it there.

The first sheep introduced into Australia were from the Cape and from India. The s.h.i.+ps which went out with the convicts of 1788 had a few sheep on board for the officers' mess, which were presumably consumed before the Cape of Good Hope was reached. There, some animals were procured for the new settlement. The Cape at the time was in the hands of the Dutch, who had large flocks of sheep and immense herds of cattle.

The sheep they had were not imported from Europe, but were the native breed they had found in the hands of the aborigines when the Dutch colony was founded one hundred and thirty years previously.

The native African sheep is of the fat-tail kind. Wool was not then an item of wealth in the Dutch colony; but the fat tails were appreciated as an excellent subst.i.tute for b.u.t.ter. All over Africa and over a large part of Asia, varieties of the fat-tail species are still to be found.

In Tibet they abound; and the Turcomans have vast flocks of them. But Tibet has also other varieties, and notably one very like the llama of Peru, with a very soft and most useful fleece, providing the famous Tibetan wool. In Palestine and Syria the fat-tail sheep is abundant; and of the Palestine breed it is recorded that they 'have a monstrous round of fat, like a cus.h.i.+on, in place of the tail, which sometimes weighs thirty or forty pounds. The wool of this sheep is coa.r.s.e, much tangled, and felted, and mixed with coa.r.s.e dark-coloured hair.'

Although the first sheep taken to Australia were from the Cape, the most important of the earlier consignments were from India, the nearest British possession to the new colony. Indeed, for over thirty years Australia was ecclesiastically within the see of the Bishop of Calcutta, and letters to England usually went by way of the Indian capital.

The Bengalee sheep are described as 'small, lank, and thin, and the colour of three-fourths of each flock is black or dark gray. The quality of the fleece is worse than the colour; it is harsh, thin, and wiry to a very remarkable degree, and ordinarily weighs but half a pound.' Not a very promising subject, one would think, for the Australian pastures, but the flesh was excellent; and climate and crossing of breeds work wonders.

That which gave value to the Australian breed of sheep, however, was the introduction of the Spanish merino, which in time found its way to the Cape, and thence to Australia. There is an old tradition that the famous merino sheep of Spain came originally from England; but it appears from Pliny and others that Spain had a reputation for fine wool long before the Roman occupation. The Spanish word merino originally meant an inspector of sheepwalks, and is derived from the Low Latin _majorinus_, a steward of the household. Some writers believe that the merino came originally from Barbary, probably among the flocks of the Moors when they captured Southern Spain. The merinos are considered very voracious, and not very prolific; they yield but little milk, and are very subject to cutaneous diseases. Youatt describes two varieties of them in Spain, and the wool is of remarkable fineness.

About the year 1790, the Spanish merino began to be imported into the Cape, and a few years later a certain Captain Waterhouse was sent from Sydney to Capetown to buy stock for the colonial establishment. He thought the service in which he was engaged 'almost a disgrace to an officer;' but when he left the Cape again, he brought with him 'forty-nine head of black-cattle, three mares, and one hundred and seven sheep'--arriving at Port Jackson with the loss of nine of the cattle and about one-third of the sheep. Three cows, two mares, and twenty-four of the sheep belonged to that officer, and with this voyage he founded not only his own fortune, but also the prosperity of the great Australian colony. Further importations followed; and a Captain Macarthur, early in the present century, went home to London to endeavour to form a company to carry on sheep-rearing on an extensive scale. He did not succeed, and returned to Port Jackson to pursue his enterprise himself. Eventually he obtained the concession of a few square miles of land, and thus became the father of Australian 'squatting.' He located himself on the Nepean River, to the south-west of Sydney; and to his industry and sagacity is attributed in great part the origin of the immense wool-trade which has developed between the colony and the mother-country.

And what is now the wool wealth of Australasia? In 1820 there were not more than ten thousand sheep of 'a good sort' in New South Wales; and in the same year, wool from the colony was sold in London at an average of three s.h.i.+llings and sevenpence the pound. This led to the circulation of fabulous reports of the profits to be made out of sheep; and there was quite a run for some years on the squatting lots. In 1848 some Australians started sheep-running in New Zealand; and by 1860 the sheep in these islands had increased to 2,400,000. In 1865 the number there had grown to 5,700,000; in 1870, to 9,500,000; and in 1894, to 19,000,000.

In 1886 the pastoral wealth of the whole of the Australian colonies consisted of 84,222,272 sheep. At only ten s.h.i.+llings per head, this represents a capital of over forty-two millions sterling, without counting the value of the land. The number of sheep in 1894 was over 99,000,000.

But now as to the yield of the flocks. The value of the wool for 1884 was 20,532,429.

The total importations of wool into England in 1885-86 were 1,819,182 bales, of which no fewer than 1,139,842 bales, or nearly three-fourths of the whole, came from Australasia. The rest came from the Cape and Natal, India, the Mediterranean, Russia, other European countries, China, and the Falkland Islands. The imports in 1894, from all quarters, consisted of 705 million pounds, of a value of 25,000,000.

It would transcend the limits of our s.p.a.ce to attempt to sketch the history and growth of the woollen industry in the manufacture of cloths.

It is an industry, if not as old as the hills, at least very nearly as old as the fig-leaves of Eden; for we may a.s.sume as a certainty that the next garments worn by our forefathers were constructed in some way from the fleecy coats of these bleating followers. We exported woollen and worsted yarns of a value of over four million pounds sterling in 1894, and of woollen and worsted manufactures, a value of 14 millions sterling.

In the middle ages all the best wool was produced in England, and the woollen manufacture centred in Norfolk, although both the west of England and Ireland had also factories. There are in existence specimens of cloth made in these medieval days which show that the quality of the wool employed was not equal to that which we now use. The art of weaving is supposed to have been brought from the Netherlands; at any rate there were strong political alliances between the English sovereigns and the weavers of Bruges and of Ghent. In these old days, when Norwich, Aylsham, and Lynn had the lion's share of the woollen trade, the great mart for English and foreign cloths was at Stourbridge, near Cambridge, where a fair was held which lasted a month every year.

There were 2546 woollen and worsted mills in the United Kingdom in 1890.

The chief seats of the wool manufacture in England in the 14th century were Bristol, London, and Norwich. Now Wilts.h.i.+re and Gloucesters.h.i.+re are famous for broadcloths, while the towns of Leeds and Huddersfield in Yorks.h.i.+re are important centres. Galas.h.i.+els and Hawick are noted for their tweeds.

COTTON.

The Father of History, in writing about India--'the last inhabited country towards the East'--where every species of birds and quadrupeds, horses excepted, are 'much larger than in any other part of the world,'

and where they have also 'a great abundance of gold,' made the following remarkable statement. 'They possess likewise,' he said, 'a kind of plant, which, instead of fruit, produces wool of a finer and better quality than that of the sheep, and of this the natives make their clothes.' This was the vegetable wool of the ancients, which many learned authorities have identified with the byssus, in bandages of cloth made from which the old Egyptians wrapped their mummies. But did Egypt receive the cotton plant from India--or India from Egypt--and when? However that may be, there is good reason to believe that cotton is the basis of one of the oldest industries in the world, although we are accustomed to think of it as quite modern, and at any rate as practically unknown in Europe before the last century. As a matter of fact, nevertheless, cotton was being cultivated in the south of Europe in the 13th century, although whether the fibre was then used for the making of cloth is not so certain. Its chief use then seems to have been in the manufacture of paper.

The beginning of the Oriental fable of the Vegetable Lamb is lost in the dateless night of the centuries. When and how it originated we know not; but the story of a Plant-Animal in Western Asia descended through the ages, and pa.s.sed from traveller to traveller, from historian to historian, until in our time the fable has received a practical verification. Many strange things were gravely recorded of this Plant-Animal: as, that it was a tree bearing seed-pods, which, bursting when ripe, disclosed within little lambs with soft white fleeces, which Scythians used for weaving into clothing. Or, that it was a real flesh-and-blood lamb, growing upon a short stem flexible enough to allow the lamb to feed upon the surrounding gra.s.s.

There were many versions of the marvellous tale as it reached Europe; and the compiler and concocter of the so-called Sir John Mandeville's travels, as usual, improved upon it. He vouched for the flesh-and-blood lamb growing out of a plant, and declared that he had both seen and _eaten it_--whereby the writer proved himself a somewhat greater romancer than usual. Nevertheless, he has a germ of truth amid his lies, for he relates of 'Bucharia' that in the land are 'trees that bear wool, as though it were of sheep, whereof men make clothes and all things that are made of wool.' And again, of Abyssinia, that mysterious kingdom of the renowned Prester John, he related: 'In that country, and in many others beyond, and also in many on this side, men sow the seeds of cotton, and they sow it every year; and then it grows into small trees which bear cotton. And so do men every year, so that there is plenty of cotton at all times.' This statement, whencesoever it was borrowed, may be true enough, and if so, is evidence that, eighteen centuries after Herodotus, cotton was still being cultivated, as the basis of a textile industry, both in Western Asia and in Africa. It is said that in the Sacred Books of India there is evidence that cotton was in use for clothing purposes eight centuries before Christ.

The expedition of Alexander the Great from Persia into the Punjab was a good deal later, say, three hundred and thirty years before Christ. On the retreat down the Indus, Admiral Nearchus remarked 'trees bearing as it were flocks or bunches of wool,' of which the natives made 'garments of surpa.s.sing whiteness, or else their black complexions make the material whiter than any other.' The Alexandrine general, Aristobulus, is more precise: he tells of a wool-bearing tree yielding a capsule that contains 'seeds which were taken out, and that which remained was carded like wool.' And long before Pliny referred to cotton in Egypt--'a shrub which men call "gossypium," and others "xylon," from which stuffs are made which we call xylina'--Strabo had noted the cultivation of the plant on the Persian Gulf.

At the beginning of the Christian era we find cotton in cultivation and in use in Persia, Arabia, and Egypt--but whether indigenous to these countries, or conveyed westward during the centuries from India, we know not. Thereafter, the westward spread was slow; but the plant is to be traced along the north coast of Africa to Morocco, which country it seems to have reached in the 9th century. The Moors took the plant, or seeds, to Spain, and it was being grown on the plains of Valencia in the 10th century; and by the 13th century it was, as we have said, growing in various parts of Southern Europe.

Yet, although the Indian cloths were known to the Greeks and Romans a century or two before the Christian era, and although in the early centuries Arab traders brought to the Red Sea ports Indian calicoes, which were distributed in Europe, we find cotton known in England only as material for candle-wicks down to the 17th century. At any rate, M'Culloch is our authority for believing that the first mention of cotton being manufactured in England is in 1641; and that the 'English cottons,' of which earlier mention may be found, were really _woollens_.

And now we come to a very curious thing in the Romance of Cotton.

Columbus discovered--or, as some say, rediscovered--America in 1492; and when he reached the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the natives who came off to barter with him brought, among other things, cotton yarn and thread. Vasco da Gama, a few years later than Bartholomew Diaz, in 1497 rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Zanzibar coast. There the natives were found to be clothed in cotton, just as Columbus found the natives of Cuba to be, as Pizarro found the Peruvians, and as Cortes found the Mexicans. These Europeans, proceeding from the Iberian Peninsula east and west, found the peoples of the new worlds clothed with a material of which they knew nothing. Cotton was king in America, as in Asia, before it began even to be known in Western Europe.

Not only that, but cotton must have been cultivated in Africa at the time when the mariners of Prince Henry the Navigator first made their way cautiously down the west coast. It is, at any rate, upwards of four hundred years since cotton cloth was brought from the coast of Guinea and sold in London as a strange barbaric product. Whether the plant travelled to the Bight of Benin from the land of Prester John, or from the land of the Pharaohs, or across from the Mozambique coast, where the Arabians are supposed to have had settlements and trading stations in prehistoric days, who can now say? But it is curious enough that when Africa was discovered by Europeans, the Dark Continent was actually producing both the fibre and the cloth for which African labour and English skill were afterwards to be needed. The cotton plantations of Southern America were worked by the negroes of Africa in order that the cotton-mills of Lancas.h.i.+re might be kept running. And yet both Africa and America made cotton cloth from the vegetable wool long before we knew of it otherwise than as a traveller's wonder.

Even in Asia, the natural habitat of the cotton plant, the story has been curious. Thus, according to the records above named, cotton has been in use for clothing for three thousand years in India, and India borders upon the ancient and extensive Empire of China. Yet cotton was not used in China for cloth-making until the coming of the Tartars, and has been cultivated and manufactured there for only about five hundred years. This was because of the 'vested interests' in wool and silk, which combined to keep out the vegetable wool from general use.

To understand aright the romance of cotton we must understand the nature of the plant in its relation to climate. It has been called a child of the tropics, and yet it grows well in other than tropical climes. As Mr Richard Marsden--an authority on cotton-spinning--says: 'Cotton is or can be grown (along) a broad zone extending forty-five degrees north to thirty-five degrees south of the equator. Reference to a map will show that this includes a s.p.a.ce extending from the European sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, from j.a.pan to Melbourne in Australia, and from Was.h.i.+ngton in the United States to Buenos Ayres in South America, with all the lands intermediate between these several points. These include the Southern States of the American Union, from Was.h.i.+ngton to the Gulf of Mexico, and three-fourths of South America, the whole of the African Continent, and Southern Asia from the Bosphorus to Pekin in China. The vast area of Australia is also within the cotton zone, and the islands lying between that country and Asia.'

The exact period at which the manufacture of cotton was begun in England is not known with absolute certainty. But as we have said, the first authentic mention of it occurs in 1641; and it is in a book called _Treasure of Traffic_, by Lewis Roberts. The pa.s.sage runs thus: 'The town of Manchester, in Lancas.h.i.+re, must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarne of the Irish in great quant.i.ty, and weaving it, returne the same again into Ireland to sell. Neither doth their industry rest here; for they buy _cotton-wool_ in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home worke the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermilions, dimities, and other such stuffs; and then return it to London, where the same is vended and sold, and not seldom sent into foreign parts, who have means, at far easier terms, to provide themselves of the said first materials.'

But here it should be explained that from the first introduction of the cotton fibre into this country, and until about the year 1773, in the manufacture of cloth it was only the weft that was of cotton. Down to about 1773, the warp was invariably of linen yarn, brought from Ireland and Germany. The Manchester merchants began in 1760 to employ the hand-loom weavers in the surrounding villages to make cloth according to prescribed patterns, and with the yarns supplied by the buyers. Thus they sent linen yarn for warp, and raw cotton--which the weaver had first to card and spin on a common distaff--for weft. Such was the practice when, in 1767, James Hargreaves of Blackburn inaugurated the textile revolution by inventing the spinning-jenny, which, from small beginnings, was soon made to spin thirty threads as easily as one. The thread thus spun, however, was still only available for weft, as the jenny could not turn out the yarn hard and firm enough for warp. The next stage, therefore, was the invention of a machine to give the requisite quality and tenuity to the threads spun from the raw cotton.

This was the spinning-frame of Richard Arkwright, the story of which every schoolboy is supposed to know.

Here, then, we reach another point in our romance. The manufacture of cotton cloths in England from raw cotton is older than the cotton culture of North America. It is, in fact, only about one hundred years since we began to draw supplies of raw cotton from the Southern States, which, previous to 1784, did not export a single pound, and produced only a small quant.i.ty for domestic consumption. The story of the development of cotton-growing in America is quite as marvellous as the story of the expansion of cotton-manufacturing in England. In both cases the most stupendous extension ever reached by any single industry in the history of the world has been reached in less than a hundred years.

And yet Columbus found the Cubans, as Pizarro found the Peruvians, and Cortes found the Mexicans, clothed in cotton. Was it from the same plant as now supplies 'half the calico used by the entire human race' (as an American writer has computed)? This estimate, by the way, was arrived at thus: In 1889-90 the cotton crop of the world was 6094 millions of pounds, and the population of the world was computed at 1500 millions.

This gave four pounds of raw cotton, equal to twenty yards of calico, per head; and the proportion of raw cotton provided by the Southern States was equal to eleven and a half yards per head. The raw cotton imported by Great Britain in 1894 had a value of nearly 33 million pounds sterling; the exports of cotton yarn and manufactured goods amounted to about 66 millions sterling.

There are several species of the cotton plant; but those of commercial importance are four in number. Herbaceous Cotton ('Gossypium herbaceum') is the plant which yields the East Indian 'Surat' and some varieties of the Egyptian cotton. Its habitats are India, China, Arabia, Egypt, and Asia Minor. It is an annual: it grows to a height of five or six feet, it has a yellow flower, and it yields a short staple. Tree Cotton ('Gossypium arboreum'), on the other hand, grows to a height of fifteen or twenty feet, has a red flower, and yields a fine silky wool.

Its habitats are Egypt, Arabia, India, and China. Hairy Cotton ('Gossypium hirsutum') is a shrub of some six or seven feet high, with a white or straw-coloured flower, and hairy pods, which yield the staple known as American 'Upland' and 'Orleans' cotton. Another variety, called 'Gossypium Barbadense,' because it was first found in Barbadoes, grows to a height of about fifteen feet, and has a yellow flower, yielding a long staple, and fine silky wool known as 'Sea Island' cotton. This now grows most extensively on the coasts of Georgia and Florida; but has been experimented with in various parts of the world, notably in Egypt, where it has succeeded; and in the Polynesian islands, where, for some reason or another, it has failed.

The cotton plant of the American cotton plantations is an annual, which shoots above ground in about a fortnight after sowing, and which, as it grows, throws out flower-stalks, at the end of each of which develops a pod with fringed calyces. From this pod emerges a flower which, in some of the American varieties of the general species, will change its colour from day to day. The complete bloom flourishes for only twenty-four hours, at the end of which time the flower twists itself off, leaving a pod or boll, which grows to the size of a large filbert, browns and hardens like a nut, and then bursts, revealing the fibre or wool encased in three or four (according to the variety) cells within. This fibre or wool is the covering of the seeds, and in each cell will be as many separate fleeces as seeds, yet apparently forming one fleece.

Upon the characteristics of this fleece depends the commercial value of the fibre. The essential qualities of good and mature cotton are thus enumerated by an expert: 'Length of fibre; smallness or fineness in diameter; evenness and smoothness; elasticity; tensile strength and colour; hollowness or tube-like construction; natural twist; corrugated edges; and moisture.' The fibre of Indian cotton is only about five-eighths of an inch long; that of Sea Island about two inches. Then Sea Island cotton is a sort of creamy-white colour; and some kinds of American and Egyptian cotton are not white at all, but golden in hue; while other kinds, again, are snow-white.

Although the term 'American Cotton' is applied to all the cotton produced in the United States of America, it really applies to a number of different varieties--such as Texas, Mobile, Upland, Orleans, &c.--each one known by its distinctive name. The differences are too technical for explanation here; but, generally speaking, the members of the 'hirsutum' species of the 'Gossypium' tribe now rule the world of cotton.

They are the product of what is called the 'Cotton-belt' of the United States, an area stretching for about two thousand miles between its extreme points in the Southern States, which are North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Over this area, soil and climate vary considerably. The 'Cotton-belt' lies, roughly speaking, between the thirtieth and fortieth parallels of north lat.i.tude. As an American expert says: 'Cotton can be produced with various degrees of profit throughout the region bounded on the north by a line pa.s.sing through Philadelphia; on the south by a line pa.s.sing a little south of New Orleans; and on the west by a line pa.s.sing through San Antonio. This is the limit of the possibilities.'

The cotton plant likes a light sandy soil, or a black alluvial soil like that of the Mississippi margins. It requires both heat and moisture in due proportions, and is sensitive to cold, to drought, and to excessive moisture. The American cotton-fields are still worked by negroes, but no longer slaves, as before the war; and, in fact, the negroes are now not only free, but some of them are considerable cotton-growers on their own account. On the other hand, one finds nowadays little of the old system of s.p.a.cious plantations under one owners.h.i.+p. Instead, the cultivation is carried on on small farms and allotments, not owned but rented by the cultivators. Large numbers of these cotton farmers are 'financed' by dealers, by landowners, or even by local storekeepers.

The cotton factor is the go-between of the grower and the exporting agent in Galveston or New Orleans, or other centre of business. After the crop is picked by the negroes--men, women, and children--and the harvest is a long process--the seeds are separated from the fibre by means of a 'gin;' and then the cotton-wool is packed into loose bales for the factor, while the seeds are sent to a mill to be crushed for cotton-seed oil and oil-cake for cattle-feeding. The loose cotton bales are collected by the factors into some such central town as Memphis, where they are sorted, sampled, graded, and then compressed by machinery into bales of about four hundred and forty pounds each, for export. In calculating crops, &c., a bale is taken as four hundred pounds net.

The cotton then pa.s.ses into the hands of the s.h.i.+pping agent, who brands it, and forwards it by river-steamer to one of the Southern ports, or by rail to New York or Boston, where it is put on board an ocean steamer for Europe. The beautiful American clippers with which some of us were familiar in the days of our youth are no longer to be seen; they have been run off the face of the waters by the 'ocean liner' and the 'tramp.' Arrived in Liverpool, cotton enters upon a new course of adventures altogether, and engages the thoughts and energies of a wholly new set of people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cotton Plant.]