as high as a man's head, and so entwined with the wild pea-vine as to
make it difficult to ride among it, all over this country. Every cotton
planter has heard of these fine primitive pasture ranges, and many have
seen them. _If the country or the climate has been cursed in our
appearance as planters here, it has been in the wasting system, that we
introduced and continue to practice_.'

Gov. Wise, in an address upon the agriculture of Virginia, condenses the
whole case in an epigram,--' The negroes skin the land, and the white
men skin the negroes.'

The limit to the production of cotton is in the capacity of the
plantation force to pick the amount cultivated by the field hands; but
the whole available force is insufficient, and large quantities are
lost. The policy of the planters being to buy out the small landholders
in their neighborhood, they have no extra force upon which to draw.
Olmsted says: 'I much doubt if the harvest demand of the principal
cotton districts of Mississippi adds five per cent. to their field-hand
force. I observed the advantage of the free-labor system exemplified in
Western Texas, the cotton-fields in the vicinity of the German village
of New Braunfils having been picked far closer than any I had before
seen,--in fact perfectly clean. One woman was pointed out to me who had,
in the first year she had seen a cotton field, picked more cotton in a
day than any slave in the county.'

'Substitute the French system (that of small allotment or
_parcellement_) for the Mississippi system in cotton-growing, and who
can doubt that the cotton supply of the United States would be greatly
increased?'