IT is a remarkable thing in the history of the United States that, when the iron shackles were about to fall from the bondman, he was caught by a cotton fiber and held for nearly a century longer. We were about to emancipate the slaves a century ago when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, multiplied cotton production by two hundred, and made slavery profitable throughout the South. The South Carolina legislature gave Whitney $50,000 and cotton became king and controlled our commerce and politics.

Eight bags of cotton went out of Charleston for Liverpool in 1784. Now about six million bales go annually, and we keep three million bales for our own use. So two-thirds of our cotton goes to England. The cotton we ship sells for more than all our flour. Cotton is still king.

In our civil war we came very near being thrown into conflict with England, by an entanglement of the same fiber which caught the black man. One of the greatest industries of England in 1861-5 was cotton manufacture, and when we, by our blockade system, closed the southern ports so cotton could not be carried out, we nearly shut down all the works in that country where cotton was made up. That meant hard times to many towns and suffering to many families. That is why so many Englishmen said we ought to be satisfied to cut our country in two and let the people of the Confederacy have their way.

Cotton is a world-wide product. It grows in all warm countries everywhere, sometimes as a tree and sometimes as a shrub. It is usually spoken of as a plant. There was cotton grown in Chicago last year. Not in a hot house, but in a back yard with very little attention. A little girl got some .seed, planted it, and had some fine bolls in the fall. It is a pretty plant, and was cultivated in China nearly a thousand years ago as a garden plant.

Herodotus tells us that the clothing worn by the men in Xerxes' army was made of cotton. Their cotton goods attracted wide attention wherever they marched. Columbus found the natives of the West Indies clothed in cotton. Cotton goods is not only wide spread, but very ancient. Cloth was made from this plant in China twenty-one hundred years ago.

At the coronation of the emperor, 502 A.D., the robe of state which he wore was made of cotton, and all China wondered at the glory of his apparel.

More capital is used and more labor employed in the manufacture and distribution of cotton than of any other manufactured product. There is one industry in Chicago which out-ranks cotton. It is the live stock business. More money is spent for meat and live stock products than for cotton, taking the whole country together. But cotton ranks first as a manufacture.

We spend more for meat than for cotton goods, and more for cotton goods than for wheat and flour. The hog and cotton seed have a peculiar commercial relation to each other. The oils produced from them are so nearly alike that lard makers use cotton seed oil to cheapen their output, A large part of what is sold as pure leaf lard comes from the cotton plant.

A hundred years ago a good spinner used to make four miles of thread in a day. This was cut into eight skeins. Now one man can do the work of a thousand spinners because of machinery. One gin does today what it took a thousand workers to do then. Five men are employed in the running of one gin, so the gin alone makes one man equal to two hundred. Because one workman cleans two hundred times as much cotton since Whitney's time as before, cotton-raising has become a broad industry. The reason more cotton was not raised in the olden times is that it could not be used. Now we can use as much cotton as we can possibly raise.

At first there was strong opposition to these improvements in machinery because the workmen felt their occupation would be taken away. But the cotton workers are to be congratulated, for there are four times as many men working in the cotton industries as there were a hundred years ago, and yarn thread is produced at less than one-tenth the cost while the workmen are all better paid for their labor.

James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1767. He was an illiterate man, and yet his machinery has not been materially improved upon. The poor fellow was mobbed by the infuriated workmen who saw that their labor was apparently to be taken from them by machinery. He was nearly killed. He sold out his invention and died in poverty. He received nothing from the government nor from the business world for his great invention. But after his death his daughter received a bounty.