Through a series of ages Africa has grown in darkness, and its capabilities, therefore,
are yet unknown and unopened up, and though our commercial relations with the
West Coast have long existed, hitherto or until quite recently there has been no trade in
cotton ; indeed, the efforts of a merchant of Manchester, twenty years since, to pro-
duce cotton on the Gold Coast for this market signally failed, and entailed on him
considerable loss. The efforts of Mr. Clegg, with the assistance of the missionaries
out there, have, however, now imparted a new life to the subject, and assisted by the
inducement of high prices here, there is great hope of its becoming a source of large
supplies. Cotton is now and could be procured there to any extent, cheaper than
from the United States. In the States the supply of cotton fluctuates, no two years
giving an equally good crop. In Africa the supply might be furnished both regularly
and abundantly.
Eg3rpt, the source whence we have up to the present time almost wholly received
our supplies of African cotton, grew no cotton until 1823 ; and Tooke, in his
History of Prices, remarked that the " quantity, which previously to 1824, had
been imported from Egypt into this country, was perfectly insignificant, reached in
1826, 21,000,000 lbs., and the effect of this sudden increase, (which was not there-
after maintained), was greater than the mere quantity relatively to the total supply,
inasmuch as it operated on the minds of the buyers as opening a great and indefinite
source of supply, at a reduced cost.*' The quantity exported from Alexandria during
the last ten years has been : —

lbs. Ibf.
