, the mule with its countless spindles, and the power-loom
are fearful competitors; and although British India still produces quite
as much cotton as our Southern States, and while she exports at least
eight hundred thousand bales annually to England and China, continues at
the same time to make the larger part of her own clothing, flourishing
cities, like Dacca and Delhi, once the seat of manufactures, are going
to decay, and a large proportion of her people, willing to toil at six
cents per day in occupations that have been transmitted for centuries
in the same families, are either driven to the culture of the fields or
compelled to spin and weave for a pittance the jute which is converted
into gunny-cloth.

When India muslins and calicoes were first imported into England, they
met with a formidable opposition. They had suddenly become fashionable,
and threatened to supersede the long-established woollens; and the
nation, in its wisdom, first prohibited the importation of these
fabrics, and then subjected them to a duty of sixpence per yard. In
France, Amiens, Rouen, and Paris protested against cotton as ruinous
to the country. But it has surmounted all these obstacles, is firmly
established in both nations, and now its manufacture gives support to
one-seventh part of the population of Great Britain, employs there
thirty-four millions of spindles, consumes annually two and a half
million bales of the raw material, and sends abroad, in addition to
thread and yarn, twenty-eight hundred million yards of fabrics, of the
aggregate value of two hundred and thirty millions of dollars.

In 1856, Great Britain derived her supply of cotton from the following
countries, namely:--

From the United States 71 per cent.
" the East Indies 19 " "
" Brazil 5 " "
" Egypt 4-1/2 " "
" the West Indies 1/2 " "

But while her supply from India in the twelve years from 1845 to 1857
increased nearly two hundred per cent, namely, from two hundred thousand
to six hundred thousand bales, she has increased her exports of cotton
fabrics to that country to such an extent, that, for every pound she
imports, she returns a pound of thread and cloth enhanced at least
fourfold in value, while she returns to the United States in cotton
fabrics less than three per cent, of the cotton she receives from them.
And since 1857 such