THE CHINESE IN AMERICA.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.'']
SIR, —Will you allow me, as one who knows something of the question, and takes great interest in it, to say a word on your paragraph respecting the proposed introduction of Chinese into the Southern United States ?
In the success of this movement lies, I verily believe, the one only hope of relief to our Lancashire cotton trade from the weight which has oppressed it ever since the commencement of the American Civil War. The negroes now number not two-thirds of what they did before that time,—they are, from various causes, some well known, but not to be described, dying out, slowly but surely there ; they wont work to anything like the extent as free men they did when in slavery (the women will not work in the cotton-fields at all now, as a rule), and it is an almost universally accepted fact that the present capacity for harvesting is limited to about such a crop as the very reduced one grown during the last two years, and, so far as negroes are concerned, this will be further reduced every year.
White labour will never grow a cotton crop in the climate of the Southern United States, and, if we are ever again to have an adequate supply of that growth (for which no other country has yet produced a satisfactory substitute), I believe we must look to the Chinese labourer for it. You say he will require high wages. The American cotton-planter can afford to pay them, and scarcely any greater benefit could be bestowed on Lancashire and on the multitudes in many directions who are pining for cheap and abundant cotton, than to facilitate the immigration of a million of these yellow boys, who have proved themselves such capital labourers in kindred climates.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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