Worcester Daily Spy

Cotton Culture In Peru.—The opening of new fields for the cultivation and growth of cotton is one of the great commercial facts of the times. The manufacturers of England and France instead of being injured by loss of the American supply, have cause for profound gratitude to God, that they have been compelled to find other and more fortunate fields. Individual enterprise has been recently prospecting in the wild regions of Peru, where the systematic culture of cotton was never before known, with excellent success. The plant becomes perennial there, and trees throw out biennial crops for ten or twelve years.

The department of agriculture at Washington has become interested in the subject, and received much valuable information as to the real extent of the capabilities of the country. Expensive machinery has been introduced there, gigantic causeways and other means of irrigation have been opened, and large wildernesses transformed into magnificent and productive cotton lands. The first cargo of cultivated cotton is already shipped—consisting of the first pickings of plants grown from seed sown since March last.

For many years the American planter's whip was heard in all the cotton markets of the world. The monopoly which the south had secured enabled it to display its "plantation manners" far beyond its own boundaries. But that time has gone forever. The great cotton monopoly is overthrown; and whatever the old fields produce hereafter will be produced in the face of as sharp competition as honest enterprise ever had to encounter.

But the laborers and growers who will probably control the production of southern cotton hereafter will not care for that. Free labor will inspire the very soil itself with new life, and make it laugh with more abundant harvests, while the ingenuity and skill that will be introduced through the new systems of production will restore the now worthless plantations to their former relative superiority.