Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/384

372 ago, but the high price of cotton during the war wonderfully stimulated its growth. The loss of, perhaps, half of the oxen in Egypt by the cattle plague in 1862-3 led to the introduction of the steam plough, and now hundreds of these engines are in operation along the Nile and the Ganges, doing, efficiently and cheaply, the work of many thousand men and cattle; while our Southern planters still stick to their old-fashioned "sweeps," "scrapers," "bull-tongues," and other nondescript ploughs and hoes, wrought, in many cases, by the negro plantation blacksmith. On Halîi Pacha's great cotton estate, near Grand Cairo, where nearly a hundred thousand acres have been cultivated in cotton since 1863, portable steam-engines, on wheels, are made to do all the ploughing, to drive the cotton-gins and presses, and, when the crop is made, to haul it to the city in immense wagon-trains along the common highway, to the infinite astonishment of donkeys, camels, and Turks.

In Egypt all the cotton lands are irrigated, and in India, to a great extent. This enables the cultivator by controlling the amount of moisture, to obviate the disastrous effects of excessive rain and drought, and to prevent the ravages of the cotton worm, thereby almost insuring a good crop. Moreover, with our elbow-room in this broad country, our enormous extent of cheap, fertile, unoccupied lands, our eagerness for individual effort and enterprise, and the hot demand for labor in the Northern States, it is impossible for us, at present, to compete in cotton growing with such countries as Egypt and India, whose pent-up millions live on the cheapest food, work for the lowest wages, and, from a servile habit of ages, submit patiently to insult and wrong. When I was in Egypt, a few years before the war, fellah labor was worth only four cents per day. Egypt was then, also, a land of Oriental cheapness. So low is the rate of wages in India that a difference of two or three cents per pound in the value of rice is the difference, with vast multitudes of people, between ordinary subsistence and famine.

But you will say "cotton is the only product that can be raised in the South."

Follow the isothermal of the "cotton-belt" over a map of the world. Does it not take you through some of the richest grain-producing countries on the globe? A greater or more pernicious delusion never possessed the minds of a people than this heresy. I could mention twenty or thirty different kinds of cereals, fruits, and vegetables—staple articles of food—that grow here in perfection.

Take an extreme case. The immense "piney woods" of the South are the very synonyme of barrenness. These forests are invaluable for lumber, tar, turpentine, and rosin. Could the worthless curs and old bloodhounds be subjected to a Bartholomew's