[39] Kellermann was created Duc de Valmy by Napoleon.--ED. INVENTION OF THE COTTON-GIN GROWTH OF THE COTTON INDUSTRY IN AMERICA A.D. 1793 CHARLES W. DABNEY R. B. HANDY DENISON OLMSTED Lord Macaulay declared that "what Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin has more than equalled in its relation to the power and progress of the United States." When Macaulay delivered this opinion, "King Cotton" was more absolute in the United States than to-day, for the cultivation of cotton has since been supplemented in this country by other industries of equal importance. Yet, what cotton had done for the United States in Macaulay's day has been far surpassed by its record since, as one of the great industrial and commercial interests of the land; and judged by export values, as estimated by the specialist Dabney, at one time Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, cotton is still king of the American market. The growth of the cotton industry in the United States, traced so minutely by Handy, witnesses from one decade to another to the supreme achievement of the American inventor so highly estimated by Macaulay. Eli Whitney was born at Westboro, Massachusetts, in 1765, and died in 1825. In 1792 he was graduated at Yale College, and that year became a teacher in Georgia, where he invented the cotton-gin. Before he could secure a patent his machine was stolen from his workshop, and others reaped the profits of his ingenuity. It is pleasing to know that he afterward made a fortune by other uses of his inventive skill. His service to the cotton industry in all its departments has not only been vastly influential in the development of his own country, but has also greatly affected the relations of the United States with other industrial nations, especially with Great Britain, the leading cotton-manufacturing country of the world. CHARLES W. DABNEY Cotton is the principal product of eight great States of the American Union, and the most valuable "money crop" of the entire country. Climatic conditions practically restrict its cultivation to a group of States constituting less than one-fourth of the total area of the country, and yet the value of the annual crop is exceeded among cultivated products only by corn, which is grown in every State of the Union, and occasionally by wheat. Cotton furnishes the raw material for one of our most important manufacturing industries and from one-fourth to one-third of our total exports.