nigh forty thousand tons of the well-cleaned bast.

What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,
indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on
Kentucky itself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest
the like of which no human eye will ever see again was felled; and
with the forest went its pastures, its waters. The roads of
Kentucky, those long limestone turnpikes connecting the towns and
villages with the farms--they were early made necessary by the
hauling of the hemp. For the sake of it slaves were perpetually
being trained, hired, bartered; lands perpetually rented and sold;
fortunes made or lost. The advancing price of farms, the westward
movement of poor families and consequent dispersion of the
Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither they carried the same
passion for the cultivation of the same plant,--thus making
Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,--the
regulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at the
rope-walk, in the factory,--what phase of life went unaffected by
the pursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the
farmer oftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it
may be, the college of his son, the accomplishments of his
daughter, the luxuries of his wife, the house he would build, the
stock he could own. His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the
South, his fox hunting at home, his fishing on the great lakes, his
excursions on the old floating palaces of the Mississippi down to
New Orleans--all these depending in large measure upon his hemp,
that thickest gold-dust of his golden acres.

With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The
record stands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd