The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the plantation force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but the whole available force is insufficient, and large quantities are lost.  The policy of the planters being to buy out the small landholders in their neighborhood, they have no extra force upon which to draw.  Olmsted says:  ’I much doubt if the harvest demand of the principal cotton districts of Mississippi adds five per cent. to their field-hand force.  I observed the advantage of the free-labor system exemplified in Western Texas, the cotton-fields in the vicinity of the German village of New Braunfils having been picked far closer than any I had before seen,—­in fact perfectly clean.  One woman was pointed out to me who had, in the first year she had seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a day than any slave in the county.’

’Substitute the French system (that of small allotment or parcellement) for the Mississippi system in cotton-growing, and who can doubt that the cotton supply of the United States would be greatly increased?’

Dr. Cloud, the most intelligent writer upon cotton cultivation I have been able to find, is urgent in his advice to manure the land, practice rotation of crops, and produce larger crops upon fewer acres.  But the universal practice is precisely the reverse; the process of exhaustion is followed year after year; cotton is planted year after year; the seed—­which Northern men would cultivate for oil alone, and which exhausts the land ten times faster than the fibre—­is mostly wasted; in the words of a Southern paper, ’The seed is left to rot about the gin-house, producing foul odors, and a constant cause of sickness.’  The land is cropped until it is literally skinned, and then the planter migrates to some new region, again to drive out the poor whites, monopolize the soil, and leave it once more to grow up to ‘piney woods.’

Note again the warning words of Dr. Cloud:  ’With a climate and soil peculiarly adapted to the production of cotton, our country is equally favorable to the production of all the necessary cereals, and as remarkably favorable to the perfect development of the animal economy, in fine horses, good milch cows, sheep and hogs; and for fruit of every variety, not tropical, it is eminently superior.  Why is it, then, that we find so many wealthy cotton planters, whose riches consist entirely of their slaves and worn-out plantations?’

No crop would be more remunerative to a small farmer, with a moderate family to assist in the picking season, than cotton.