The dynasty of Cotton is based on the monopoly of the cotton-culture in the Cotton States of the Union; its whole policy is directed to the two ends of making the most of and retaining that monopoly; and economically it reduces everything to subserviency to the question of cotton-supply; —­thus Cotton is King.  The result necessarily is, that the Cotton States have turned all their energies to that one branch of industry.  All other branches they abandon or allow to languish.  They have no commerce of their own, few manufactories, fewer arts; and in their abandonment of self in their devotion to their King, they do not even raise their own hay or corn, dig their own coal, or fell their own timber; and at present, Louisiana is abandoning the sugar-culture, one of the few remaining exports of the South, to share more largely in the monopoly of cotton.  Thus the community necessarily loses its fair proportions; it ceases to be self-sustaining; it exercises one faculty alone, until all the others wither and become impotent for very lack of use.  This intense and all-pervading devotion to one pursuit, and that a pursuit to which the existence of a servile class is declared essential, must, in a republic more than in any other government, produce certain marked politico-philosophical and economical effects on the master-class as a whole.  In a country conducted on a system of servile labor, as in one conducted on free, the master-class must be divided into the two great orders of the rich and poor,—­those who have, and those who have not.  That the whole policy of the Cotton dynasty tends necessarily to making broader the chasm between these orders is most apparent.  It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton, he who has must be continually increasing his store, while he who has not can neither raise the one staple recognized by the Cotton dynasty, nor turn his labor, his only property, to other branches of industry; for such have, in the universal abandonment of the community to cotton, been allowed to languish and die.  The economical tendency of the Cotton dynasty is therefore to divide the master-class yet more distinctly into the two great opposing orders of society.  On the one hand we see the capitalist owning the labor of a thousand slaves, and on the other the laboring white unable, under the destructive influence of a profitable monopoly, to make any use of that labor which is his only property.

What influence, then, has the Cotton dynasty on that portion of the master-class who are without capital?  Its tendency has certainly necessarily been to make their labor of little value; but they are still citizens of a republic, free to come and go, and, in the eye of the law, equal with the highest;—­on them, in times of emergency, the government must rest; their education and intelligence are its only sure