But Southern planters are not without some ingenious machines. In a _premium_ essay upon the cultivation of cotton, read before the Georgia Agricultural Society, the Hon. Mr. Chambers thus describes one invented by himself for covering the seed: 'I would cover with a board made of some hard wood, an inch or an inch and a half thick, about eight inches broad, beveled on the lower edge to make it sharp, slightly notched in the middle so as to _straddle_ the row, and screwed on the foot of a common shovel.' Very safe for negroes to use, not being complicated. But in the protests of intelligent Southern men, when they occasionally wake up to the terrible results of their mode of cultivation, may be found their own condemnation. Dr. Cloud, of Alabama, editor of the '_Cotton Plant_,' mourning the want of pasturage in his own State, writes thus: 'Our climate is remarkably favorable to rich and luxuriant pasturage. The red man of the forest and the pioneer white man that came here in advance of our _scratching plow_, tell us they found the wild oat and native grasses waving thick, as high as a man's head, and so entwined with the wild pea-vine as to make it difficult to ride among it, all over this country. Every cotton planter has heard of these fine primitive pasture ranges, and many have seen them. _If the country or the climate has been cursed in our appearance as planters here, it has been in the wasting system, that we introduced and continue to practice_.' Gov. Wise, in an address upon the agriculture of Virginia, condenses the whole case in an epigram,--' The negroes skin the land, and the white men skin the negroes.' The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the plantation force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but the whole available force is insufficient, and large quantities are lost. The policy of the planters being to buy out the small landholders in their neighborhood, they have no extra force upon which to draw. Olmsted says: 'I much doubt if the harvest demand of the principal cotton districts of Mississippi adds five per cent. to their field-hand force. I observed the advantage of the free-labor system exemplified in Western Texas, the cotton-fields in the vicinity of the German village of New Braunfils having been picked far closer than any I had before seen,--in fact perfectly clean. One woman was pointed out to me who had, in the first year she had seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a day than any slave in the county.' 'Substitute the French system (that of small allotment or _parcellement_) for the Mississippi system in cotton-growing, and who can doubt that the cotton supply of the United States would be greatly increased?'