IS COTTON OUR KING?

BY A COTTON-SPINNER.


No falsehood has been so persistently adhered to by the Southern
planters and their advocates, and so successfully forced upon the
credulity of the North, as the statement that white men can not perform
field labor in the cotton States, coupled with the equally false
assertion that the emancipated negro lapses into barbarism, and ceases
to be an industrious laborer.

It is one of the chief points of weakness in a bad cause, that, although
a _single_ advocate may succeed in rendering it plausible, _many_ are
certain to present utterly irreconcilable arguments. An impartial man,
examining De Bow's _Review_ for a series of years, would arrive at
conclusions in regard to the economy of slave labor, and the necessity
of colored laborers in the Southern States, the very reverse of what the
writers have intended to enforce.

It is constantly asserted that white men can not labor in the tropics,
which we may freely admit; but the inference that the climate of the
Southern States is tropical we have the best authority for denying:
firstly, from the testimony of all Southern writers when describing
their own section of country, and _not_ arguing upon the slavery
question; and, secondly, from Humboldt's isothermal lines, by which we
find that the temperature of the cotton States is the same as that of
Portugal, the south of Spain, Italy, and Australia. Do we find
Australian emigrants writing home to their friends not to come out