basis, and represents our woolen interests under every variety of circumstances, and in every phase of prosperity and adversity. Eight different woolen tariffs were in force-some of them, like that of 1828, stimulating production and manufacture into manias-and others, like that of 1846, striking down at a blow a great branch of our manufactures, (that of broad cloth,) and actually revolutionizing the sheep husbandry of our country. It was the death-knell of fine-wooled sheep* in North America. Periods of pecuniary inflation and depression succeeded each other like the sunshine and storms of tropical skies. Thus the wool prices above given may be said to display about the degree of strength and persistency possessed by the wool growing interest, in our country, down to the opening of the present civil war.

This picture would not be historically complete without a statement of the prices of wool during the war of 1812, and during the maritime and commercial restrictions which preceded that event, but I have given this elsewhere; and those prices occurred under circumstances so different from those that now prevail, or ever can again prevail in our country, that they furnish no important lesson pertinent to the inquiry which I propose to enter upon.

'Fine wool is now about 10 cents, medium about 17 cents, and coarse about 25 cents higher per pound, than they have ever been before since the war of 1812, taking the contemporaneous paper currency as the standard of value.

The rise in the price of wool has naturally been accompanied by a rise in the price of sheep. The average price of the latter, for example, in Ohio, for the ten years ending with 1860, is estimated to have been a few mills less than $1.29 per head. In New England, New York, and some other States, they were somewhat higher; but taking our whole country together, they did not, for the same period, average more than $1.50 or $1.75 per head. To-day, they would probably average double the last named sum. No one ever saw common and grade sheep so high priced before; and pure blood Merinos have reached the "high water marks" of 1809 and 1810, and of the period of the importation of the Saxons, between 1824 and 1828. Frequently in the first, and occasionally in the last of those periods, from $1,000 to $1,500 were paid for a ram, and $1,000 for a ewe. Within the past year I have known $2,500 to be offered and refused for a ram, and $1,000 per head to be offered and refused for ewes, and $20,000 to be offered and refused for fifty ewes. All these were genuine offers. Several rams were sold last Fall from $1,200 to $1,500 a head and quite a number of ewes from $400 to $800 a head. From $100 to

* I mean really fine-wooled sheep, like Saxons, high grade Saxons, &o.

$150 are almost as common prices for good full blood stock ewes in Vermont, as $40 and $50 were five years ago.

In the prices of sheep and wool, we have a sufficient explanation of the enormous increase in their numbers which is now taking place in our country. In a moment of such remarkable apparent prosperity, are not intelligent wool growers called upon, like the mariner who feels the favoring breeze swelling into a gale in his sails, to look warily about for those portents which indicate whether the ship can hold on safely under her present canvass or whether it is necessary to "furl away" to meet the coming squall?

The important questions which now press themselves on the attention of every considerate flock-master, are: Is this extraordinary advance in the market value of the sheep and wool the result of exceptional and temporary causes, and therefore likely to be of limited continuance, or is it occasioned by circumstances which may be expected to be of permanent duration? If it is to be temporary, how rapidly, and to what extent, will it recede? Or, to generalize these and many similar questions into one, What are the future prospects of wool growing in our country? This is the vital question of the day appertaining to that important industrial interest which this Association has convened to consider, and I may therefore presume, gentlemen, it is the one you would prefer to hear discussed on this occasion.

I. Is the existing advance in the market value of sheep and wool, the result of temporary or permanent causes?

The rebellion of the cotton growing States of the Union, and its resulting effects, have cut off, or vastly diminished our supply and the world's supply of cotton. Wool is required to take its place, and this has produced scarcity and correspondingly high prices in the latter commodity. From 1841 to 1850, inclusive, the cotton crop of the United States averaged 2,173,000 bales per annum, and from 1851 to 1860, inclusive, 3,251,911 bales per annum. In 1850, the annual manufacture of cotton in the United States, was 487,500 bales, or 195,120,000 pounds. In 1860 it had reached 910,090 bales, or 364,036,000 pounds.* The latter amount cost $55,994,755, which is less than seven cents per pound. In 1863, those best informed on the subject, estimate the consumption at but 4,000 bales per week, or 208,000 bales for the whole year-only about twenty-five per cent. of the former consumption. And this would have been considerably less but for the recent re-opening of the trade with New Orleans.

This enormous diminution of production has fallen heavily on the manufacturer as well as the consumer. Most fortunately, the cotton spinners of

According to census returns, the whole crop grown in the United States in 1860, was 5,196,944 bales of 400 pounds each.

Massachusetts, alarmed by the prospect of a short crop in 1860-'61, laid in a full year's supply from that crop, and by running on short time in 1861, they continued to operate a portion of their machinery until the latter part of 1862, at a large profit. In November and December, 1862, the scarcity of goods carried the price of cloth to a point which gave a small profit at the ruling prices of cotton, and the same state of things has continued since. Yet in Mr. Bachelder's report to the Boston Board of Trade, on the cotton manufacture of 1861, he estimated the spindles stopped in the last six months of that year at half the whole number.

In Mr. Atkinson's report to the Boston Board of Trade, on the cotton manufacture of 1862, from which I have derived most of the foregoing facts, it is stated that on June 1st of that year, of the 4,745,750 spindles north of the Potomac, 8,252,000, or sixty-eight and a half per cent. of the whole number, were stopped; and that in the succeeding July, more than seventy-five per cent. of them were stopped.

I learn from the same authority that the expenses and interest on unused mills of the value of $600,000, kept in good repair, exceeds eight per cent., without including the depreciation of idle machinery.

But between these clouds there falls, thank God, a beam of the brightést sunshine. It appears that the operatives have not suffered. Enlistments in the army and the demand for mechanics in the government workshops, have, says Mr. Atkinson, given employment to the men, while the woolen mills, more active than ever before, and the manufacture of shoes, clothing, etc., have absorbed the labor of female operatives, so that at Lowell, where the stoppage of cotton spindles has been largest, deposits in the savings banks actually and largely increased in 1862.

Let us take a brief glance at the falling off of our exports of cotton. The following statements are derived from official returns to the Treasury:

But custom-house returns do not disclose the real facts, so far as exports are concerned. The officers of our treasury have ascertained from foreign official exhibits that there were irregularly and surreptitiously exported, during the year ending June 30, 1861, the following amounts of cotton, not of course included in our custom-house records:

To England.....
To the Continent..

750,663,546 lbs ..133,000,000 #

With the irregular and surreptitious exports of 1862, the total is swelled to the following figures:

The greater efficiency of the blockade in 1863, diminished the amount of cotton escaping from the southern States by sea, but enough was hauled from Texas to Metamoras, in the Mexican territory, and shipped from thence direct, or through the West Indies, to England, to give the latter a better supply of American cotton that year than she received in 1862.

In Mr. Ure's recent work on Cotton Manufacture, it is estimated that the number of cotton spindles in Great Britain, in December, 1860, wa 33,099,056; that the number of pounds of cotton consumed that year was 1,050,895,000, and that the total value of the product was $441,664,713. It gives some idea of the rapid extension of the manufacture, when I state, on the authority of a parliamentary return, that during the ten years preceding the close of 1860, cotton spindles increased in Great Britain at the average rate of 20,718 spindles per week. In 1861, England consumed 43,350 bales of cotton per week; in 1862, 20,790 bales per week: in 1863, 25,750 bales per week.*

It appears to be imagined by some persons that cotton, or at least that American cotton, as a staple of industry, has had its day-that it will never again be extensively cultivated in our country,-that wool, flax, hemp, jute, and other textiles yet to be discovered, or made available, will become substitutes for it. There is not a shadow of foundation for such an opinion. Cotton is one of the greatest physical blessings which God has vouchsafed to man, and as a textile is only second to wool both in value and necessity. If it could be supplanted by any substitutes, those substitutes would, to the same extent, supplant wool-but, in reality, you might as well talk of supplanting beef, pork or corn! Like each of the three great articles of sustentation just named, it is not, of itself, indispensable to the support of human life-but perhaps the loss of neither of them, taking the whole world together, would produce so irreparable a chasm in the comforts and solid utilities of life.

All the attempted substitutes for cotton have proved failures for general purposes, and in the comparative cost of production. Nor can wool be considered an exception, when it and cotton now command about the same prices, and when it costs about four or five times as much to grow a pound of wool as a pound of cotton.

The bales of 1862 and 1863, are as five bales in weight in 1860 and 1861, being Surats, &o.

But, say some, the discontinuance of the cotton supply from the United States will force its production on other countries, and before civil war closes production will become so firmly established in them that it can not subsequently be supplanted; but, on the contrary, aided by cheaper labor and soils, it will drive the American article even from our own markets. Such a result would not benefit the wool grower, for it would cheapen a competing staple. And, let me remark, it would dry up one of the most prolific fountains of our national wealth, independence and prosperity.

But, in truth, there is no danger whatever of such a misfortune. Under the spur of the present demand, cotton exports are constantly increasing from India, Turkey, Siam, China, Japan, some of the West India Islands, Brazil, Peru and Honduras. But in the first place, not one of those countries can produce an article comparable with the American in value. Their cottons are all too long stapled, too coarse, or are defective in other essential qualities. In British India, the hardest struggle has been made to rival and supplant American production. But Surats, as India cotton is denominated in commerce, can not, on any present machinery, be profitably spun into yarn above No. 35. On January 30th, 1862, the price of middling to fair Surats in the Liverpool market, was from 14 to 18 pence,* while that of a corresponding grade of American cotton was 22 to 26 pence per pound. The shipment of the former from India to Liverpool was smaller in 1862 than in 1861. In 1860, when these same competing cottons were in the market, and when Great Britain manufactured 20,196,420 pounds of cotton per week, 874 per cent. of it was American. In the report of Mr. Cassels, on Cotton in the Bombay Presidency, published in England in 1862, it is distinctly admitted that the staple of the India eotton can not be materially improved; that it must continue to hold a subordinate place in the European markets, and that the American variety can not be successfully grown there.

II. In none of the countries named can cotton production be rendered as profitable as in the United States, because none of them are so well adapted, by their natural conditions, to its culture. In India, for example, the average product is less than 70 pounds per acre; the number of acres per hand but two or three; and it is cultivated only as a rotation crop once in three or four years-while a fair yield in Texas is 500 pounds, and an average yield 400 pounds to the acre, and one hand tills ten acres, with five acres of corn. The average yield of all the cotton lands of the United States does not probably fall short of 350 pounds to the acre. The natural advantages of the United States are also regarded as decidedly

English pence, it will be born in mind, are nearly twice the value of United States cents.