The plant of India resembles that of America in most particulars. It is there often placed in alternate rows with rice, and after the rice-harvest is over puts forth a beautiful yellow flower with a crimson eye in each petal; this is succeeded by a green pod filled with a white pulp, which as it ripens turns brown, and then separates into several divisions containing the cotton. A luxuriant field, says Forbes in his "Oriental Memoirs," "exhibits at the same time the expanding blossom, the bursting capsule, and the snowy fleeces of pure cotton, and is one of the most beautiful objects in the agriculture of Hindostan."
The manufacture of cotton in India, with very simple machinery, was early brought to high perfection. Travellers in the ninth century describe muslins in India which were of such fineness that they might be drawn through a ring of moderate size; and Tavernier speaks of turbans, composed of thirty-five ells of the cloth, which would weigh but four ounces. Muslin has been sold in India for five hundred rupees the piece, so fine, that, when laid upon the grass after the dew had fallen, it was no longer visible. The patience, the nice sense of touch, and the flexible fingers of the Hindoos have with the simplest means achieved results in this branch of manufacture which have not been surpassed by any people.
But this manufacture is now breathing its last; the cotton-gin, the spinning-frame, the mule with its countless spindles, and the power-loom are fearful competitors; and although British India still produces quite as much cotton as our Southern States, and while she exports at least eight hundred thousand bales annually to England and China, continues at the same time to make the larger part of her own clothing, flourishing cities, like Dacca and Delhi, once the seat of manufactures, are going to decay, and a large proportion of her people, willing to toil at six cents per day in occupations that have been transmitted for centuries in the same families, are either driven to the culture of the fields or compelled to spin and weave for a pittance the jute which is converted into gunny-cloth.
When India muslins and calicoes were first imported into England, they met with a formidable opposition. They had suddenly become fashionable, and threatened to supersede the long-established woollens; and the nation, in its wisdom, first prohibited the importation of these fabrics, and then subjected them to a duty of sixpence per yard. In France, Amiens, Rouen, and Paris protested against cotton as ruinous to the country. But it has surmounted all these obstacles, is firmly established in both nations, and now its manufacture gives support to one-seventh part of the population of Great Britain, employs there thirty-four millions of spindles, consumes annually two and a half million bales of the raw material, and sends abroad, in addition to thread and yarn, twenty-eight hundred million yards of fabrics, of the aggregate value of two hundred and thirty millions of dollars.
In 1856, Great Britain derived her supply of cotton from the following countries, namely:—
From the United States 71 per cent. " the East Indies 19 " " " Brazil 5 " " " Egypt 4-1/2 " " " the West Indies 1/2 " "
But while her supply from India in the twelve years from 1845 to 1857 increased nearly two hundred per cent, namely, from two hundred thousand to six hundred thousand bales, she has increased her exports of cotton fabrics to that country to such an extent, that, for every pound she imports, she returns a pound of thread and cloth enhanced at least fourfold in value, while she returns to the United States in cotton fabrics less than three per cent, of the cotton she receives from them. And since 1857 such improvements have been made in the cotton-mills of New England, that we now consume more than a million of bales annually, and our production and export are rapidly increasing.
Some curious alternations have attended the growth and manufacture of cotton. As machinery has improved and the cost of goods diminished, the price of cotton has advanced and a strong stimulus been given to its production.
New States have consequently been opened to its culture, and the alluvial lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas have been devoted to the plant. Slaves have thus been attracted from the Middle States and diverted from the less profitable culture of wheat and tobacco to the cotton-fields. Half a century since, the Middle States contained two-thirds of the negroes of the Union; but under the census of 1860 two millions and a half of slaves are now found south of North Carolina, and but a million and a half north of the Cotton States. In the Cotton States the negroes nearly equal the white population; in the Border States the whites are at least four to one. In the Cotton States the slaves and the culture of cotton are increasing at the rate of at least five per cent.; in the Border States the slave population is either stationary or retrograde, and the future of those States is clearly indicated. Down to a recent period the march of the planter and his forces across the Cotton States has been like that of an invading army. Vast forests of heavy timber have been felled, land rapidly exhausted and abandoned, and new fields opened and soon deserted for a virgin soil.
But with the increased demand of the last seven years for cotton, and with the enhanced price of the slave, which rises at least one hundred dollars with each advance of a cent per pound on cotton, more permanent improvements have been made, railways have been opened, and at least fifty thousand tons of guano and cotton-seed have been annually applied to the exhausted cotton-fields of the Carolinas and Georgia. Under these appliances the crops of the United States have kept pace with the manufacture, and in 1859 rose to the amount of twenty-one hundred millions of pounds, thus replenishing the markets that had been recently exhausted, and actually exceeding the entire consumption for the same year of both Europe and America.