"NEW HAVEN, CONN.," Dec. 4, 1886. "... I send you a photograph taken from a portrait of my father, painted about the year 1821, by King, of Washington, when my father, the inventor of the cotton-gin, was fifty- five years old. He died January 25, 1825. The cotton-gin was invented in 1793; and though it has been in use for nearly one hundred years, it is virtually unimproved.... Hence the great merit of the South, financially and commercially. It has made England rich, and changed the commerce of the world. Lord Macaulay said of Eli Whitney: 'What Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin has more than equaled in its relation to the power and progress of the United States.' He has been the greatest benefactor of the South, but it never has, to my knowledge, acknowledged his benefaction in a public manner to the extent it deserves--no monument has been erected to his memory, no town or city named after him, though the force of his genius has original invention. It has made caused many towns and cities to rise and flourish in the South.... "Yours very truly, E. W. WHITNEY."] [Relocated Footnote (2): Grave doubts, however, found occasional expression, and none perhaps more forcibly than in the following newspaper epigram--describing "Finality": To kill twice dead a rattlesnake, And off his scaly skin to take, And through his head to drive a stake, And every bone within him break, And of his flesh mincemeat to make, To burn, to sear, to boil, and bake, Then in a heap the whole to rake, And over it the besom shake, And sink it fathoms in the lake-- Whence after all, quite wide awake, Comes back that very same old snake!] CHAPTER XIX THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE