improvements have been made in the cotton-mills of
New England, that we now consume more than a million of bales annually,
and our production and export are rapidly increasing.

Some curious alternations have attended the growth and manufacture of
cotton. As machinery has improved and the cost of goods diminished, the
price of cotton has advanced and a strong stimulus been given to its
production.

New States have consequently been opened to its culture, and the
alluvial lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas
have been devoted to the plant. Slaves have thus been attracted from the
Middle States and diverted from the less profitable culture of wheat and
tobacco to the cotton-fields. Half a century since, the Middle States
contained two-thirds of the negroes of the Union; but under the census
of 1860 two millions and a half of slaves are now found south of North
Carolina, and but a million and a half north of the Cotton States. In
the Cotton States the negroes nearly equal the white population; in the
Border States the whites are at least four to one. In the Cotton States
the slaves and the culture of cotton are increasing at the rate of at
least five per cent.; in the Border States the slave population is
either stationary or retrograde, and the future of those States is
clearly indicated. Down to a recent period the march of the planter and
his forces across the Cotton States has been like that of an invading
army. Vast forests of heavy timber have been felled, land rapidly
exhausted and abandoned, and new fields opened and soon deserted for a
virgin soil.

But with the increased demand of the last seven years for cotton, and
with the enhanced price of the slave, which rises at least one hundred
dollars with each advance of a cent per pound on cotton, more permanent
improvements have been made, railways have been opened, and at least
fifty thousand tons of guano and cotton-seed have been annually applied
to the exhausted cotton-fields of the Carolinas and Georgia. Under
these appliances the crops of the United States have kept pace with
the manufacture, and in 1859 rose to the amount of twenty-one hundred
millions of pounds, thus replenishing the markets that had been recently
exhausted, and actually exceeding the entire consumption for the same
year of both Europe and America.

But the crops fluctuate from year to year, and a less favorable season
for 1860, accompanied by an increase of at l