INDIA COTTON FEVER.

39

India induced several opulent men immediately to embark for that country; and large bribes, I had occasion to know, were offered by a speculator to one of Captain Baylis's agents if he would enter into his employment; which, of course, the American refused.

The India mail, during the last summer, brought intelligence that this corps had reached their destination, and made a commencement upon 1000 acres of land in the fertile district of Tinnevelly, with every prospect of success. The account also stated that arrangements were being made by the Company's servants for extending their scale of operations as widely as possible; and that large tracts of land had been purchased by private individuals for the same purpose. "Indeed," says an English correspondent of mine, in a recent letter, "India seems to be visited with a sort of cotton mania not unlike your multicaulis fever."

In a late pamphlet, Thomas Clarkson says, "I have recently received intelligence from India, that individuals are hiring large tracts of land of the East India Company, principally for the cultivation of cotton. One person has taken 60,000 acres at his own risk, and expects to employ one hundred thousand people more than at present!" Brother Jonathan, who is generally on the ground when the bell

rings for dinner, hoping to find the cultivation of cotton "a pretty good sort of a business," has also taken up 66 some small patches" of a few thousand acres; and a number of Americans, resident merchants in India, have thrown commerce aside for the more profitable business of planting cotton. The whole body of British abolitionists have entered cordially into the measure, believing that the success of the scheme will be the death-knell of American slavery. They have but one great object now before them—the abolition of slavery in India; and they believe that the general cultivation of cotton in those countries will have a tendency to overthrow slavery in America, by rendering it impossible for slave labour (acknowledged to be more expensive) to compete with the freegrown products of the British empire. The English abolitionists feel that every shilling which goes out of Great Britain for cotton, or any other slave-grown product, goes into the pocket of the slaveholder, and thereby contributes to uphold the system. This feeling is becoming almost universal in England among men of all parties; and all who take any particular interest in the slavery question are labouring with a zeal they never manifested before, in advancing the interests of cotton planting in India; and while I believe that many of them are influenced by higher motives, yet I do

not doubt that feelings of hostility against the interests of the South mingle with their efforts.

Said William E. Gladstone, a notorious, boisterous, church-extension-anti-West-Indiaemancipation -liberty-hating - high-tory-dearbread-loving declaimer, in a speech in Parliament (30th of March, 1838), "If the facts were thoroughly investigated, it could be shown that the British manufacturers were actually the most effectual encouragers, not only of slavery, but of the slave-trade itself. By what means was the slave-trade with the Brazils carried on? By British manufactures, directly imported from this country. The British manufacturer sent his cotton goods to the Brazils; these were immediately shipped off from the Brazils to the coast of Africa, and were there exchanged for human ware, which the Brazilian trader brought back." (Hear, hear.) "You," said the honourable gentleman, "who are so sick with apprenticeship in the West Indies; you, who cannot wait for twenty-four months, when the apprentices will be free, are you aware what responsibility lies upon every one of you at this moment, with reference to the cultivation of cotton in America? There are three millions of slaves in America. America does not talk of abolition, nor of the amelioration of slavery. It is a domestic institution, which appears des

tined to descend to the posterity of that free people; and who are responsible for this enormous growth of what appears to be eternal slavery? Is it not the demand that creates the supply? and is it not the consumption of cotton from whence that demand arises? You consume 318,000,000 pounds of cotton which proceed from slave labour annually, and only 45,000,000 pounds which proceed from free labour; and that, too, while you have the means in India, at a very little expense, of obtaining all you require from free labour."

Said a distinguished author, after reading this speech to an immense meeting in Exeter Hall, “We shall be fools, indeed, if we do not take a lesson from that speech. (Hear, hear.)" Says the before-quoted American, in his com. munication published in London, "I hope the planters of our Southern States may not be afraid to be heard above their voices in asking themselves, 'What are we to do? Can we meet this supposed change? Is it right, or politic, or profitable, to continue the wasteful system of slave labour any longer?' The answer of every candid man who inquires into the subject is, you cannot go on exhausting whole tracts of fertile land by this plan; moving farther West every few years, and the original plantations falling back into an unreclaimed

RIVALRY OF INDIA WITH THE SOUTH. 43

wilderness (which is the operation at the South), without ruining yourselves and the country also. I believe it can be safely asserted that, with the present costly system of slave labour at the South, the planters will not be able to stand so many chances against them. If we have been able to produce the same article with a rich soil and ingenious machinery, it does not stand to reason that other countries, with the same soil (Dr. Roxburgh says 'he never saw or heard of an India farmer manuring in the smallest degree a rice-field; yet these fields have probably for thousands of years continued to yield annually a large crop of rice of an average of thirty to sixty fold-even eighty or one hundred has been known') and cheaper labour (because free), may not take advantage of our improvements, and, backed by a wealthy company, and encouraged by a powerful government, be able to defy our competition. It is not possible; it is against the very nature of our present system."

The South have considered this matter; at least, they are now beginning to see the tendency of these movements in the East. Says the "Cotton Circular," an able paper put forth by a convention of planters in South Carolina not long ago, "The slave-holding race could not maintain their liberty or independence for five