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 244 her cotton wool, arises mainly from the indiscretion of the residents who were appointed by the late East India Company to superintend ostensibly the cultivation of the plant, but whose conduct practically had the effect of producing results exactly the reverse of their mission. They were an ignorant and inefficient class of men, and matters grew worse and worse under their supervisionary authority. Experiments which, in many instances, contained infallibly the germs of success, failed in their hands; and attempts to do what might have been performed with little difficulty were ere long abandoned in despair or disgust. Who could expect the natives, left to themselves, would prove competent to seize young America by the throat and cry—“Pay me that thou owest!”

All the cotton plantations in India are in the hands of natives; but fear not, gentle reader, I am about to enter into none of those interminable and complex disputes which have raged so violently among zemindars, ryots, factors, and agents. Neither have we time to examine the causes of that failure in which so often experiments in the improved culture of the plant have eventuated. Whilst in Bengal excessive moisture has been said to have spoiled their crops, in the north-western provinces excessive drought brought on the same disaster. American planters, fresh from the fields of Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas, have invested their capital and devoted their energies, intellectual as well as physical, in furtherance of the Indian cotton cause, and whilst they have themselves found it to be, under existing circumstances, a very unprofitable occupation, and by no means an over-pleasant pastime, Sir John Lawrence, in raptures of delight, has grown cotton luxuriously in his garden in the Punjab, upon terms, too, so commercially advantageous, and with results so thoroughly satisfactory, that its remunerative cultivation and its capability of amelioration are placed beyond all reasonable doubt. The Chinese, who are hardly so particular as ourselves in the quality of their raw material, take a deal of cotton from India—not to make all the nankeen in the world, very much of which my reader may be surprised to hear is manufactured in England, and thence sent out to the land of its baptism—but for purposes of their own, into which, since we have learnt how to make nankeen and grow tired of it, we do not care to inquire. Now, in India, they produce much cotton wool and use but little. In 1847 the crop was utterly worthless for lack of roads by which it might have been conveyed to where it was wanted and would have been prized; and so great was the distress and discontent resulting from this state of things, that, to meet them, the land-tax was remitted though the cotton was lost. As the material may be purchased in India for 1½d. to 2d. per lb., temptations were not wanting to embark a little money and apply a little skill in establishing a factory at Madras or Calcutta, just to see how far they could go concurrently with the rest of the world in fabricating for themselves and for exportation. The languor of the native character soon proved the great obstacle to this achievement. After a few hours of activity, lassitude takes firm hold of the artisan, and he and the gang to which he is attached, give place to fresh hands which, in turn, are also rapidly exhausted and require the same relief and renovation. These coffee-coloured, sun-burnt, hot-blooded fellows are incapable of toil. It takes three or four of them to do the work of one silver-headed Saxon; and hence the yarn comes to a price as long as itself, and would weave into a very extravagant piece of ordinary cloth, much dearer, without being in any respect better, than what we manufacture at home. Some forty years since, when the distaff was first exchanged for the throstle and the mule-jenny, native factories existed which, in Madras only, produced goods to the value of some 100,000,000l., but the importation of British cottons, with their recommendations of superior cheapness and quality, soon overwhelmed the straitened attempts of the Hindoos to struggle with their masters in a race depending so largely upon vigour and science. This miscarriage leaves the question between India and ourselves in this striking position. We bring our cotton staple 5000 miles from India and take it back that distance manufactured in the various forms required, and there sell it at a very considerably smaller figure than that at which the natives can buy the same article, grown, spun, and wove by themselves. It is fair, however, to confess that in the immediate neighbourhood of the spot where the cotton is reared, the yarns spun by the natives by the aid of mechanical power infinitely excel those produced in England with the same wool, in consequence of the great deterioration the raw material endures from packing and carriage. And now, in a few words having reference to the claims of the new Australian colony of Queensland, I will bring my remarks on this great subject to a close.

The climate of Queensland is perhaps the finest in Australia, and in character very strongly resembles that of Madeira. Yet it is remarkably well adapted to the cultivation of cotton, sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, rice, and other products of the earth which usually flourish under circumstances highly detrimental to the health of man and the conservation of human life. The soil, too, is all that could be desired, and the European constitution can as well support the exhausting effects of toil here as under European influences. The part of Queensland best fitted for the growth of cotton, is that east of what is called the Main Range. The river Darling, which gives its name to the Darling Downs,—a district regarded emphatically as the garden of Australia, where the land is rich and prolific, the supply of water regular and abundant, the climate moderate, the weather sufficiently constant, and the charms of nature spread around in every graceful variety,—could be made at a very small cost to open up some 5000 miles of country available for the production of the choicest kinds of this valuable textile. Several bales of Moreton Bay cotton have indeed already arrived in England, and the ablest judges, having valued them at very high prices, concur in advocating measures designed to promote a system of regular production. A somewhat peculiar and rare advantage resides in the climate of this district. It is free from anything like severe frost, and this absence