The annual average production of cotton is probably seventeen hundred millions of pounds, or less than two pounds per head for the population of the world; and certainly not one-tenth of what would be consumed could they find means to pay for it; and not one-tenth of what would be good for them; and yet it is a drug, selling in India at two and three cents per pound, and commanding here at this moment, notwithstanding the abundance of gold, but eight or nine cents, with a certainty that, should we again be favoured, as we were a few years since, with a succession of large crops, it will fall to a lower point than it ever yet has seen: a state of things that could not exist were the people of the world to consume even one-third as much as would be good for them. Why do they not? Why is it that India, with her hundred millions of population, and with her domestic manufacture in a state of ruin, consumes of British cottons to the extent of only sixteen cents per head--or little more, probably, than a couple of yards of cloth? To these questions an answer may perhaps be found upon an examination of the circumstances which govern the consumption of other commodities; for we may be quite certain that cotton obeys precisely the same laws as sugar and coffee, wine and wheat. Such an examination would result in showing that when a commodity is at once produced at or near the place of growth in the form fitting it for use, the consumption is invariably large; and that when it has to go through many and distant hands before being consumed, it is as invariably small. The consumption of sugar on a plantation is large; but if it were needed that before being consumed it should be sent to Holland to be refined, and then brought back again, we may feel well assured that there would not be one pound consumed on any given plantation where now there are twenty, or possibly fifty. The consumption of cotton on the plantation is very small indeed, because, before being consumed, 'it has to be dragged through long and muddy roads to the landing, thence carried to New Orleans, thence to Liverpool, and thence to Manchester, after which the cloth has to be returned, the planter receiving one bale for every five he sent away, and giving the labour of cultivating an acre in exchange for fifty, sixty, or eighty pounds of its product. If, now, the people who raised the cotton were free to call to their aid the various natural agents of whose service it is the object of the British system to deprive them, and if, therefore, the work of converting it into cloth were performed on the ground where it was raised, or in its neighbourhood, is it not clear that the consumption would be largely increased? The people who made the cloth would be the consumers of numerous things raised on the plantation that are now wasted, while the facility of converting such things into cloth would be a bounty on raising them; and thus, while five times