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.

But the crops fluctuate from year to year, and a less favorable season for 1860, accompanied by an increase of at least ten per cent. in spindles, leaves the supply barely equal to the demand, while the diminished crop, and the cry of Secession at the South, with the introduction of an export-duty, have alarmed the spinners of England and led them to consider the effects of a deficiency and to seek new sources of supply.