you know also how important the production of this article has become in the decision of that great moral question of the age—the destruction of slavery; and I need not pause here to show what a blessing we might become to our race and to the world, by the "disturbing element" of thousands of bales of cotton, competing with the oppressors of our race in the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow, and beating down their ill-gotten gains! It grows all around us here, amid the huts, and villages, and the rice farms of our heathen neighbors, and by the use of bounties we can largely prompt its growth among them, as also by our own labor lead to its extensive and profitable cultivation in our own fields.
To the query put, "How can we as a nation bless mankind, and contribute to their well-being and civilization?" I answer, that our farmers, by their toil and energy, can lessen the needs of distant men, break down the barbarism of unrequited toil, and give cheer, by their production, to foreign lands.
The annual demand for sugar, for coffee, for cotton, has never yet been fully met in any of their great markets. Within a few recent years, the East Indies, Algiers, Egypt, and the Fantees, below us on this coast, have been increasing the quantity of cotton sent to England; while there has been no sensible diminution of the large masses shipped from America; and yet to the "Board of Commerce" in Manchester there are few, if any, questions more puzzling than this—that is, "Whence they can secure new and larger supplies?
It is the same with sugar: Cuba, India, Singa-
