It cannot be, therefore, because there has not been land enough that we have not in former years had cotton enough; it cannot be that there has not been a demand for the produce of the land, for the demand has constantly outstripped the supply; it has not been because the price has not been sufficient, for, as is well known, the price has been much higher of late years, and the profit to the planter much greater; and yet, notwithstanding the land and the demand, and the price and the profit, the supply of cotton has not been sufficient for the wants of the spinners and the manufacturers of the world, and for the wants of civilization. The particular facts with regard to this I need not, perhaps, enter into; but I find, if I compare the prices of cotton in Liverpool from 1856 to 1860 with the prices from 1841 to 1845, that every pound of cotton brought from America and sold in Liverpool fetched in the last five years more than twenty per cent in excess of what it did in the former five years, notwithstanding that we were every year in greater difficulties through finding our supply of cotton insufficient. But what was the reason that we did not get enough? It was because there was not labour enough in the Southern States. You see every day in the newspapers that there are four millions of slaves, but of those four millions of slaves some are growing tobacco, some rice, and some sugar; a very large number are employed in domestic servitude, and a large number in factories, mechanical operations, and business in towns; and there remain only about one million negroes, or only one-quarter of the whole number, who are regularly engaged in the cultivation of cotton. Now, you will see that the production of cotton and its continued increase must depend upon the constantly increasing productiveness of the labour of those one million negroes, and on the natural increase of population from them. Well, the increase of the population of the slaves in the United States is rather less than two and a-half per cent, per annum, and the increase on the million will be about twenty-five thousand a-year; and the increased production of cotton from that increased amount of labour consisting of twenty-five thousand more negroes every year will probably never exceed--I believe it has not reached--one hundred and fifty thousand bales per annum. The exact facts with regard to this are these: that in the ten years from 1841 to 1850 the average crop was 2,173,000 bales, and in the ten years from 1851 to 1860 it was 3,252,000, being an increase of 1,079,000 bales in the ten years, or only about 100,000 bales of increase per annum.