In considering this staple, the first circumstance that excites our surprise is the rapidity with which the amount of it has annually increased.  Does not this fact, however, demonstrate that the cultivation of it could not have been so very unprofitable?  If the business were ruinous, would more and more have annually engaged in it?  The quantity in 1816 was eighty-one millions of pounds; in 1826, two hundred and four millions; and in 1830, near three hundred millions!  The ground of greatest surprise is that it has been able to sustain even its present price with such an enormous augmentation of quantity.  It could not have been done but for the combined operation of three causes, by which the consumption of cotton fabrics has been greatly extended in consequence of their reduced prices:  first, competition; second, the improvement of labor-saving machinery; and thirdly, the low price of the raw material.  The crop of 1819, amounting to eighty-eight millions of pounds, produced twenty-one millions of dollars; the crop of 1823, when the amount was swelled to one hundred and seventy-four millions (almost double of that of 1819), produced a less sum by more than half a million of dollars; and the crop of 1824, amounting to thirty millions of pounds less than that of the preceding year, produced a million and a half of dollars more.

If there be any foundation for the established law of price, supply, and demand, ought not the fact of this great increase of the supply to account satisfactorily for the alleged low price of cotton? * * *

Let us suppose that the home demand for cotton, which has been created by the American system, should cease, and that the two hundred thousand bales which the home market now absorbs were now thrown into the glutted markets of foreign countries; would not the effect inevitably be to produce a further and great reduction in the price of the article?  If there be any truth in the facts and principles which I have before stated and endeavored to illustrate, it cannot be doubted that the existence of American manufactures has tended to increase the demand and extend the consumption of the raw material; and that, but for this increased demand, the price of the article would have fallen possibly one half lower than it now is.  The error of the opposite argument is in assuming one thing, which being denied, the whole fails—­that is, it assumes that the whole labor of the United States would be profitably employed without manufactures.  Now, the truth is that the system excites and creates labor, and this labor creates wealth, and this new wealth communicates additional ability to consume, which acts on all the objects contributing to human comfort and enjoyment.  The amount of cotton imported into the two ports of Boston and Providence alone during the last year (and it was imported exclusively for the home manufacture) was 109,517 bales.