In those far-off days when King George of England was trying to force the rebellious Americans to buy and drink his tea and pay for his stamps, the people of Georgia and South Carolina were first beginning to try if they could do something in the way of raising cotton. After the war of independence was over, an American merchant in Liverpool received from the South a small consignment of eight bags of cotton, holding about twelve hundred pounds, the feeble pioneer of the great cotton commerce. When it was landed on the wharves in Liverpool, in 1784, the custom-house officials of that place looked at it with alarm and suspicion. What was this white-faced stranger doing here, claiming to come from a land that had never seen a cotton-plant? It must have come from somewhere else, and this was only a deep-laid plot to get itself landed on English soil without paying an entrance fee. So the stranger was seized and locked up, and Mr. Rathbone, the merchant, had no easy time in proving to the officials that it was really a scion of the American soil, and that the ships that brought it had the right to do so. But after it was released from confinement there was still a difficulty. Nobody would buy it. The manufacturers were afraid to handle this new and unknown kind of cotton for fear it would not pay to work it up, and at last it had to be sold for a song to get a trial. Such was the state of the American industry at the period when the great republic was just born. It may be said that the nation and its greatest product were born together, like twin children. [Illustration: COTTON-GIN.] The new industry grew very slowly, and the planters who were trying to raise cotton in their fields felt much like giving it up as something that would never pay. In fact, there was a great difficulty in the way that gave them no end of trouble, and made the cost of cotton so great that there was very little room for profit. For a time it looked as if they would have to go back to corn and rice and let cotton go by the board.