Year: 1879

30 stamped upon his memory as the
scene Of deserved punishment and an
ignoninious defeat.


In giving this brief dissertation on
the mule and his characteristics as
feature or agent in Southern economies,
have done so because, of all agencies
in the labor and progress of that Sec
ton, he has played scarcely less than
secondary part, and, amusing as well
as interesting when properly Under
stood, the country, as a whole, could
hardly be pictured truthful snd COM
pletely without picturing him.


Next, if we take cotton and tobacco
planting especially as subjects Tor brief
study and considerable n, we shall find
features of interest in each worthy of
the study of all who, care anything
whatever for those great constituents
which figure SO prominently in building
up the country in its commerce snd
trade. And, however we might be in
clined to carelessiy ignore those small
and apparently-when considered indi-
vidually-i -insignifcan and poor agen-
cies which are in use to make the cot
ton crop, particularly, yet let them for
a single year be stricken down; let the
rude and poor plows and other field
implements be set aside for o single
season, with the hands that WELD them,
and how would the commerce of our
chief cities and of the world afar shrink.
and again feel the effects, as during the
late war.


And yet how few, how very few, COM
prehend properly the hard conditions
under which this crop is made; how its
single bales are made to swell the vast
aggregate finally piled up at New Or
leans, at Mobile, at Savannah and other
seaboard cities, where it is shipped to
the commercial cities of the rest of the
world. Away in the edges of seething
and muddy swamps on the Yazoo, the
Louisiana bayous, the lagoons of Red
river, of the Tombigbee, the st, Johns
and Savannah places where. as friend
once expressed it, " the planter can
stand in his owu doorway and shoot
alhgators all the day long"-there,
under "a sky which overhead is as of
brass, while the earth under foot is as
of iron'-men toil-somebody human
through the long and blazing
summer days, until, after months OF
such labor, the consummation is
reached, the crop is ready to be gath
cred, and, finally, is gathered and sent
to market, returning to the toilers not
wealth, not even a competence, but
only the means of living, and this fol-
lowed from year to year.


And if we take the "uplands," sec
tions where the conditions of labor are
not so hard, the conditions of success
seem at least more precarious. Diff
cult in the shorter season to crowd it in
between the late frosts of spring and
the early frosts of the fall season, how
oft is almost the entire labors and
hopes of whole year partially or who'll
ly rendered of no avail by an untimely
frost, while boll-worms and other pests
come In between to do their best for its
destruction. TO say nothing of scorching
and destructive droughts or rains, almost
as fatal to its healthful condition. But,
above all, when nearing the end of the
growing season, the plant, in its size
and thriftiness, gives promise of
splendid return of lint" how often, on
the northern verge of its production, is
every hope and expectation of returns
blasted in single frosty fall night, the
next day seeing the magnificent field,
that was so green and promising only
twenty four hours previously, blackened,
ruined, smelling rankly and horribly in
the warm sunshine that seems to mock
at the wholesale desolation. These and
numberless others are among the trials,
from year to year, of the cotton grower
But even this is not all Away down
on the aff1uents of the Lower Mississippi
the Arkansas, the Red river, and other
streams bc1dered by fine bottomlands not
very far above the water at the best, let
us suppose that the cotton raiser has, in
the growing season, run the gantlet of
all the destructive agencies above indi-
Gated, and done it successfully; that
the huge cotton bolls, white with the
harvest" bursting with their wealth of
production, are only waiting to be
gathered. The next thing, perhaps,
here comes the muddy river, invading
and creeping higher and higher, day
by day, over the splendid promise of a
years hard labor, until, ere long, a
rushing and turbid sea is sweeping,
wrathfully, every prospect of compen-
sation away.


And, perhaps, in most sections of the
South the cotton crop may be the main
dependence to keep the place going,
and to keep out of or get out of debt; and
with the exception of little corn, and,
of course, limited quantity of sweet
potatoes and other garden truck" this
is too often the case. Does it not show
how precarious thing Southern farm
ing is, and are those people much to be
envied whose calling it is? To make
cotton successfully, in the lowlands es-
pecially, it must have no divided allegi-
ance. lis, after all, at the early stages
of its growth especially, a tender plant; /;
it must not get in the weeds;" and as
one acre of cotton will ordinarily pay for
several of corn, of course the temp
tation is almost irresistible to make the
one acre purchase the produce of the
several acres from somebody else further
northward.


But besides all this in regard to cot
ton-need I much more than glance at
and intimate that the Louisiana sugar
crop is, in its certainty of profitable re-
turns, even more precarious still that a
killing frost sometimes. and sometimes
rise in the river, destroys the chances
of the cane grower for any compen-
sation for his labors; that there is such
an article as "sour sugar" and other
spoiled sugars, ruined somehow in the
conversion and proper capitalization OF
the cane-juice, while the capital needed
for this crop is simply enormous.


And, if we turn to the rice crop, to
the submerged fields where this crop is
made, to its vast combinations oi
bitches, and other instrumentalities
needful, and which in that unattractive
and unhealthful region somebody mus
&c 10 l,o1 81 II -