tion most pleasing to behold, because of the pleasant and paternal relations of the proprietor toward his dependents.

Recently a peculiar phase of agricultural co-operation has been seen in this country. In some portions of the West improved farms are being offered for sale upon an agreed basis of a certain portion of the crops for a period of years. Usually it is provided that a certain area shall be laid down in wheat each year, for a period of ten years, and one-half the proceeds applied each year upon the payment for the farm. Under such contract the debt is extinguished at the end of ten years, whatever the crops may have been. Here cooperation is exercised apparently for the sole purpose of home-building. Capital takes a secondary place, making itself subservient to, and dependent upon, for protection, the honesty of purpose and integrity of labor.

In the Blue Grass region of Kentucky it is a common practice for the land owner who has surplus pasturage to let his fields for grazing, taking in payment an agreed price for each pound that the stock shall gain while on his range. Here agriculture affords the basis for co-operation between invested capital and ready working capital. The immense tobacco crop of the United States, which requires proportionately less land and more labor than most other crops, and which returns a larger sum per acre than any other crop of extended cultivation, is very largely grown by co-operation between the land owner and the laborer. The land owner in this case often furnishes working stock and implements, storage, and sometimes advances a sum of money monthly for the maintenance of the laborer until the crop is made ready for market. The profits in this work are often very large; but the laborers who engage in it are usually negroes who have never learned the arts of thrift; their earnings are dissipated almost as soon as received, and the beginning of each season finds them as poor as in the last, and dependent as then upon "advances" upon the prospective crop. Were these people thrifty, or were they under the careful supervision of some one interested in their welfare, so that a percentage of their earnings were saved for them each year and invested in the land, a little time would suffice for building up a class of small farmers who would

own and reside upon the land which they cultivate, and who would be vastly more desirable citizens than the class as it now stands.

Immediately after the war, in some portions of the South, when the control of the freed black labor and the further cultivation of the cotton staple were subjects of grave discussion, some men who retained their wits broke up the negro "quarters " on their plantations, distributed the negroes at convenient points upon the land, sold each head of a family a mule "on time," and put them at work cultivating allotted portions of their estates as free tenants 66 on shares." These experiments were very largely successful, and had this wise policy been more generally followed, it would have done much toward preventing the crime and suffering and misery that followed emancipation. The negro race, when made to feel the responsibilities of citizenship, when furnished a motive for steady application, and especially when put in friendly competition with others of their own people, have developed traits which show them to be amenable to the same ambitions that control others. Agriculture is an industry for which they are peculiarly fitted, and co-operative colonization could be advantageously adopted for relieving some portions of the South from the surplus black population. But the controlling power would need to be placed in hands which would govern firmly and wisely.

We have gone far enough to show that neither the idea nor its application is new. Labor, desiring to participate in the reward of its own toil beyond the mere bounds of a wage-worker, has more often found its opportunity and complement in land than elsewhere. But in such efforts it has largely been thrown upon its own resources, left unguided and unassisted; whereas, in co-operative manufactures, capital, strong, vigilant, trained in every avenue of the industry which is being prosecuted, is ever at hand to direct, advise, and encourage to the mutual good.

In co-operative manufactures capital is the predominating element. It precedes labor, has more at risk, can be more easily dissipated; if it suffers injury the combination quickly fails. With agriculture as a basis, and capital in land, labor would be the predominating element. The first ef

fort must now be directed toward protecting and sustaining that. The capital need not be so jealously guarded, for the land cannot melt away. Judicious direction of the enterprise must, of course, be assured, or profit fails, to the detriment of both. The labor being sustained, capital need not fear the sudden paralysis, protest, assignment, ruin, that so often come upon commerce with the suddenness of a thunder clap. Labor, but not capital, can create values. In any profit-sharing industry, or elsewhere, the more that labor can produce in proportion to the capital employed, the greater the profit that will result to the whole and the better will labor be rewarded in the division.

In agriculture, the more labor can be circumscribed, confined to the close cultivation of a limited area for the purpose of producing the most valuable things that can be grown from the soil, say, as an example, medicinal roots and perfumers' flowers as one extreme, against corn and cattle as the other, the greater the profit that will accrue both to land and labor. But the cultivation of the crops of the first extreme is limited by climate, soil, and market, and demands an amount of technical and scientific knowledge not always available. In the branches of agriculture bordering upon the other extreme, the labor of a single individual is equal to the cultivable needs of a large area. In these, cheap lands are necessary in order that capital may be fitly rewarded.

I have said that in agriculture capital may look for a better reward than in manufactures. I am aware that this proposition is open to question, so far as the highpriced farms of the older and more thickly

settled states are concerned; but open to no question at all as applied to lands in the West and South, and possibly to the farms of New England which have been abandoned before the tide of western emigration, and which may be purchased for a mere bagatelle. In no other industry could the same amount of capital furnish a basis for co-operation with so much labor. Ten thousand dollars, judiciously invested in low-priced lands, might engage in diversified agricultural industries the labor of half a hundred workmen.

A movement upon this line would be of value in helping preserve the ratio of population which should be engaged in agriculture. The tendency of the times is toward the withdrawal of the population from such pursuits, and if the tendency remains unchecked the proper balance between producer and consumer cannot be maintained much longer. Agriculture is not now overdone. We have really no surplus production of food; and with the increase of population and the decrease of the ratio of producer to consumer, it will not take long to effect a shortage. But far beyond all else, beyond wide questions of social or political economy, beyond the advantage to capital, lies the great fact of the benefit to the individual that might result from a scheme of agricultural co-operation judiciously conducted by private capital or by the state. Homes might be obtained in this way by men who never can hope for homes in any other; and though labor and a degree of poverty remain as their portion, it will not be the hopeless labor and the degrading poverty that so abound among the laboring elements of our cities.

Na little account of India, Herodotus says that it is the finest of all the countries of the East. He says that, with the exception of the horses, the beasts and birds in India are the largest in the world. He says the people get their gold by washing it out, while other people have to dig for theirs. And then, as the acme of their lazy prosperity, he says their wool grows on trees. "The trees there, in a state of nature, bear woolly fruit, which in beauty and in strength surpasses the wool from sheep, and the people of India wear clothes made from it."

This is the first allusion to cotton made in western literature. It is a little curious, indeed, that no distinct reference to it is to be found in the Bible, which runs back to much further than Herodotus. The Jews must have seen cotton awnings and probably cotton clothing in Babylon; and there could hardly have been an army from the East on the soil of Palestine, but embodied many cotton-clothed soldiers.

Herodotus, it will be seen, speaks of it by way of gratifying that curious natural wish of the human heart, that things may grow on trees. In all travellers' stories, their accounts of such marvels are the most attractive. Roast chickens, growing on trees, are a part of the bill of fare in Peter Wilkins. In the same category, Herodotus, wishing to commend India to his readers, tells them in brief that there is no need to feed or wash sheep, none to clip their wool. An end to shepherds, and to wolves, no nightly watches, no daily tramp for the recovery of ram or of lamb. All this disappears when he tells his readers that the wool grows on trees.

And alas, the readers believed him as much and as little as the readers of Peter Wilkins believed him!

Ir is a gentle reproof to our western braggadocio, that till the most recent times all our jennies and frames have never done that which could match with what the East Indian men and women did without any

wheels, with their distaffs only, more than two thousand years ago, and nobody can tell how much more. The Arabian Nights

are full of stories of muslin so delicate that pieces of it could be passed through a lady's ring, and there was such muslin worn in India long before the time of the Arabian Nights. It was not until Hargreaves's time that English spun cotton could be used in a shuttle at all, — and it is only very recently that the fineness of the finest East Indian thread has been attained anywhere but in India. Perhaps this is a matter of climate. It is well known that our highly charged electrical air is unfavorable to the finest spinning. The muslin made by the East Indians is said by the Greek writers to make "transparent garments" when wet, and in modern times Mr. Ward speaks of muslin which is invisible when it lies on the grass wet with dew.

The colors and figures used by the Indians were, in many cases, very beautiful; and one is sorry to be told by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt that it has been necessary for the triumphant march of free trade gradually to destroy the ingenuity and skill which produced such fabrics. He tells us, - what every lover of beauty, industry, and art regrets to know, that the industrious people around Madras, who once could carry their spinning with them and work at odd minutes on the most beautiful fabrics in the world, are now condemned to idleness by that great requisition of the economists, that men shall buy the cheapest instead of making the best. Of course, under the theory of free trade, the East Indian spinners should emigrate to Manchester, because the coal and iron are there, and should reduce the local wages by their competition. But this they have not yet chosen to do. And you and I are expected not to complain, while a generation or two of industrious people learn to live in indolence on five cents a day, so that a great theory may be fairly tested.

Readers will remember that some of the Indian names still hold. Muslin means something which was sold at Mosul. Calico

means something which came from Calicut. Our American use of calico for a printed cloth only is quite recent.

As to our dear New England. If any of the readers in Yankeeland care to send to Baltimore for some cotton-seed, ordering an early variety, if they will soak this a little first and then plant it in hotbeds, say in the end of April, or early in May, if they will transplant to the open garden the young plants when they are an inch or two high, they will have, before the end of summer, if their luck has been good, the showy white, yellow, and pink blossom which is the glory of the southern plantations in the time of bloom. Nay, all this can be had without the hot-bed, though then, of course, the blossom will come later and the seed will not ripen. But if your hot-bed work has been careful, and there are no early frosts in September, you may harvest a few bolls of ripe cottonseed. Pick out the seed carefully, there will be so little that you will not need to gin it, and take it down in a basket to your father's mill. Ask that nice Jane Hutchinson to take it, just before work is stopped, and see if she cannot work it in on her spindles. She is a bright girl, and I think that she and the overseer and your father will be able to manage it among them, and they will like to try. For the experiment of manufacture from New England-raised cotton has not, I think, been tried before; and Yankees love novelties. As matter of the routine of business, your father and the overseer and Jane Hutchinson would rather put a bale of uplands through the mill than your basketful.

It has been observed that in great critical years, cotton, had it been planted, would have ripened in New England. Thus the frosts of 1861 held off so that the cotton boll ripened here. As much as to say that the cotton of Carolina was king no longer.

BUT New England found uses for cotton long before there were any jennies or other spinning-frames. First of all, it was used, as Cortes had used it, and as Montezuma's ancestors had used it, to make corselets against Indian arrows. Put up a good quilted "comfortable" of your grandmother's for a mark, the next time you have an archery

party. There will be one great advantage ; namely, that you can hit it, which is more than can be said of a target. An iron arrow, sharp pointed, will go through it. But you will find a flint arrow hardly ever cuts through; and by the time it has cut through, its force is very much abated.

Well, as I say, the Mexican princes had found this, and so their soldiers wore cotton-quilted armor. And Cortes was not above learning from them, and he clothed his men in cotton-quilted corselets to fight the Mexicans; and the Connecticut people were not above learning from both, so, after their Pequot war had taught them what cold flint could do, well driven home from a bow of walnut or ash, they sent to the West Indies for cotton for their corselets. This I learn from this wonderful new book on New England commerce, by Mr. Weeden, from which you may learn almost anything, and which the readers of the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE will get the good of in more ways than one; for it contains all the elements of New England romance and poetry. The early imports into Connecticut and the Bay belong to the year 1640 or 1641. They rapidly increased. For the women who could spin flax found they could spin cotton. And there never was a house-mother in Yankeeland but who knew how convenient "cotton-wool" was in that great business of fighting winter, and keeping people warm at night. Winthrop says in 1643 of his neighbors, "They are setting on the manufacture of linen and cotton cloth." It is worth note that this is almost as early as our earliest mention of the manufacture of cotton in England. This mention is found in Bartholomew Roberts's book, published in 1641. But that refers to manufactures which had existed for some time. The Assembly of Connecticut, in 1642, orders the town of Windsor to take 110 worth of cotton from Mr. Hopkins, Wethersfield the same, and Hartford 200. This was probably to be used for corselets for their trainbands. The figures show how large were Mr. Hopkins's importations, which seem to have been, in some sort, on the public account. About the same time John Winthrop speaks of cotton from Barbadoes as abundant here.

As early as 1661, at the school for Indians at Martha's Vineyard, "wheels, cards, and cotton-wool" were provided; so that

THE Curious will find ample food for study in the details given by Mr. Weeden of the steady import of cotton, - always from the West Indies, observe, — from the dates given above to the time of the first efforts to manufacture cotton by machinery, of which, and of the triumph resulting, he gives the narrative. Much of the cotton thus imported was doubtless used as wool, as cotton-wool is used now. But, as has been said, the fingers that could spin flax could spin cotton, and did. Cotton thread, as spun by the spinning-wheel and woman's fingers, was not regular enough to be shot back and forth in the shuttle, and the thread thus made was used for the woof only, the warp being made of linen. It is said that no fabrics, of which the whole substance was cotton, were made in England before 1760. The English or American spinner could not spin with the regularity of the East Indian girl.

Ben Franklin had watched the progress of spinning, and he once expressed the hope that he should live to see the invention of a machine which should spin as much thread in an hour or a day as two girls could. He lived to see much more than that. For, though he nowhere mentions it, I believe, it can scarcely be that he did not take some opportunity to do so, in his longest visit in England. For Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1764, and set eight spindles in one frame to spinning light thread at one operation. As good an account as any, for the general reader, is that given by Miss Edgeworth in Harry and Lucy. This was written about 1823, when people were alive who had seen and worked the first jennies. Lucy's natural wish was that it might prove that the machine was named from some nice Jenny whom it had redeemed from drudgery. But this wish, it seems, cannot be gratified. "They do say" that the machine was named, as Whitney's was afterwards, a "gin" or an "engine," and that "jenny" is only a corruption from that word. This is a pity. One would rather trace it to the Djinns of the Arabian Nights, as Mr. Lowe and Captain Baker choose to spell them, whom we knew as "genii" when we were children. Djinn,

lologists must let us believe that the root is in that solid little "gen," which is in the genesis of all things, and provides all the ingenuity of the world.

PAPERS in this magazine next month will lead the reader along to trace the marvellous ingenuities of Arkwright, of Crompton, and the later masters in this affair. My business is with the romance and poetry of it, which put their heads forth at every corner. None of them-not Ben Franklin himself— guessed that there was a lad in Westboro', in Massachusetts, mending fiddles, taking clocks to pieces and setting them going again, making knives and buttons for a livelihood, who was going to furnish all their mills with more grist than the world dreamed of. Eli Whitney was born the year before Hargreaves made the first spinning jenny. There are, I think, people in Westboro', his old home, who have seen him in his hale old age; for he died as late as 1826. The story used to be told of him there, that in his eagerness to learn how the family clock was made, he stayed at home from church one Sunday, under pretence of sickness. So soon as the family was well out of sight he seized the clock, took it to pieces, "learned the law of the instrument," and put it together again, before they returned. Happily for him, and perhaps for the world, the clock continued to perform well, -better than many other clocks which have thus been treated by the curious. His father made knives, and the risks of commerce in the Revolution gave a certain protection to this nascent industry. Eli Whitney himself earned enough at it to be able to go to Yale College, and graduated there in 1792,- at the very time by the way, I think in the very month, when Richard Arkwright died. The last time I spoke to Alpha Delta at Yale College, I took pleasure in reminding the boys that it was not a hundred years since one of their graduates, in six months after he left college, had made the invention which revolutionized the commerce, not to say the economical and social order of the world.

Years ago I was in correspondence with a near friend, an enthusiast, as I am, about scientific and technical education. He is