sent him the message of good cheer through the passing breeze and the whispering leaves—that he would in twenty years, having carried these burdens uncomplaining, make a crop of $800,000,000. Yet this he has done, and from his bounty the South has rebuilded her cities, and recouped her losses. While we exult in his splendid achievement, let us take account of his standing. Whence this enormous growth? For ten years the world has been at peace. The pioneer has now replaced the soldier. Commerce has whitened new seas, and the merchant has occupied new areas. Steam has made of the earth a chess-board, on which men play for markets. Our western wheat-grower competes in London with the Russian and the East Indian. The Ohio wool grower watches the Australian shepherd, and the bleat of the now historic sheep of Vermont is answered from the steppes of Asia. The herds that emerge from the dust of your amazing prairies might hear in their pauses the hoof-beats of antipodean herds marching to meet them. Under Holland’s dykes, the cheese and butter makers fight American dairies. The hen cackles around the world. California challenges vine-clad France. The dark continent is disclosed through meshes of light. There is competition everywhere. The husbandman, driven from his market, balances price against starvation, and undercuts his rival. This conflict often runs to panic, and profit vanishes. The Iowa farmer burning his corn for fuel is not an unusual type. Amid this universal conflict, where stands the South? While the producer of everything we eat or wear, in every land, is fighting through glutted markets for bare existence, what of the southern farmer? In his industrial as in his political problem he is set apart—not in doubt, but in assured independence. Cotton makes him king. Not the fleeces that Jason sought can rival the richness of this plant, as it unfurls its banners in our fields. It is gold from the instant it puts forth its tiny shoot. The shower that whispers to it is heard around the world. The trespass of a worm on its green leaf means more to England than the advance of the Russians on her Asiatic outposts. When its fibre, current in every bank, is marketed, it renders back to the South $350,000,000 every year. Its seed will yield $60,000,000 worth of oil to the press and $40,000,000 in food for soil and beast, making the stupendous total of $450,000,000 annual income from this crop. And now, under the Tompkins patent, from its stalk—news paper is to be made at two cents per pound. Edward Atkinson once said: “If New England could grow the cotton plant, without lint, it would make her richest crop; if she held monopoly of cotton lint and seed she would control the commerce of the world.”