and composition as may be desired in the final product. When wheeled off from the chemical apparatus into a heap, it cakes, and has to be ground again, after which it is put into bags, and is ready to be transported and applied to the soil. An immense business has already been done both in the raw and manufactured article. The nodules were first extracted for manufacture into manure in the North, but the whole business has been taken up briskly in Charleston, and to import artificial manures into South Carolina is now like carrying coals to Newcastle. An export of the nodules to the most distant parts is growing into magnitude. Vessels are loading just now with this phosphate deposit for England and Scotland; and such is the energy with which the Charleston men have thrown themselves into the utilisation of this mine of wealth round their shores, that the export of the raw material is likely to increase with rapid stride, freight being probably the greatest difficulty in the case. As for the manufacture of superphosphate manures here for local purposes of fertilisation, the result is placed beyond all doubt. The Wando Company, which was the first to enter fully into the trade, divided 30 per cent. of profit, and created by its success a little furore for phosphate digging and manufacture. There are now twelve companies operating or about to operate in this new industry, and local works for the manufacture of sulphuric acid have also been set agoing. The planters are taking the manure freely. On the day I arrived in Charleston, bills for a million dollars of this home-made manure fell due and were satisfactorily discharged. One effect has been to benefit the railways in giving them more inland freight, of which they have hitherto felt the scarcity. Some of the planters I have met with say that the manure is as good as Peruvian guano, while others do not give quite so favourable a report. The price is 30 per cent. less than guano; and with an expenditure of three to five dollars to the acre there is the most abundant practical testimony of its productive and profitable results. The scientific men have hitherto not thrown much light on this remarkable natural phenomenon. I believe Dr. Shephard, of the Medical College here, has had more to do in bringing this extraordinary deposit into notice than any other. Agassiz came and looked at it, and was deeply interested, but declined to enter into any elaborate scientific diagnosis or investigation. It seems that the people had been long carting the nodules off the soil as an obstruction to the plough, and were laying the streets with them, ignorant or heedless of their valuable properties. They are, no doubt, a superficial deposit, and cannot be dug out to much depth. There is usually a rapid end to such concentrated animal remains. The nodules overlie an immensely deep bed of white limestone marl, in which Dr. Shephard has found There is an artesian down 1,200 feet for from 2 to 9 per cent. of phosphate of lime. well in Charleston, that has been bored water, passing through eight or nine hundred feet of this white limestone marl, which has been recognized as underflying all the country round. Over this dense bed of marl the phosphate nodules are found, sprinkled as in a layer in some places of a few inches deep, and cropping out in stray pieces on the surface of the soil; but from the varying thickness of the layers, and the frequency with which the diggers have not exhausted them at the depth of three or four feet, the probability is that they will be found in pockets of occasionally great richness. The deposit has already, at all events, been found uniformly over an immense area, and science has begun to forecast its discovery at other points of the coast from Acquia Creek to the shores of Florida. The remarkable thing commercially is that these phosphate deposits of South Carolina have been brought into daylight and practical use at the moment when they are most needed to fertilise the sandy and exhausted soils of the Atlantic States, and to bring them up to a better competitive level with the richer lands of the Gulf and the Mississippi. To South Carolina they are indeed twice blessed, for while increasing the productiveness of the inland soil, they will gather immediately at Charleston a large amount of capital, which is here one of the things most wanted. The phosphate "diggings" may be expected to make serious inroads on the rice lands round Charleston. But this is probably no great loss. Nothing could be easier than to extend the cultivation of rice all about Charleston, which on various sides has broad, shallow, sedgy swamps, through which the tide flows from the rivers. I went out a few miles to a cotton plantation, and a part of the road-made by a heavy deposit of shells passed through a section of this swampy ground. The part of the swamp thus separated was rapidly forming into good agricultural soil. The tidal water must be banked off from rice land, and a free command of fresh obtained for irrigation. It would not be difficult, by a few embankments, to make much new rice ground about Charleston; but the wet culture of rice is admitted, even in these parts, to be more fatal to human life than almost anything else, and to extend it up to the very streets of a large town would be bad policy. Rice was a diminishing product of the United States for ten years before the war. Yet South Carolina sold of her crop of the year just ended 40,000 tierces, which were not only an increase on the previous year, but were two-fifths of the total production of rice in the American Union. Almost the whole went to home consumption. South Carolina rice has all but ceased to be an article of export to foreign countries. The cotton plantation which I went to see did not present a paradise to be put in contrast with a rice-field. It had been the pet place of the owner and cultivator of several plantations. There was a splendid mansion closed up, and flower and vegetable gardens over which the pigs of the negroes had free "ish and entry,' and a noble verandah from which there was a delightful view of the Cooper River and of fine avenues of trees by which the plantation was approached and bounded on all sides. There were also superior fields of cotton, sown with Dickson's seed and amply phosphated, and so full of young bolls that it was doubtful whether so late they could ever come to maturity. Yet it was confessed to me that all would not pay. This is probably not the way in which cotton can be profitably cultivated in these days, and my city friend, who pays a rent of 700 dollars for the place, seemed quite conscious of the fact, and not to care much about it one way or other. Yet I could not but admire the environs of Charleston-good roads which one expects to see on approaching any place of importance, whether it be the chief city of a State or the residence of a duke or a millionaire— noble trees, too deeply draped perhaps with the mossy veils peculiar to miasmatic regions-summer gardens which adverse circumstances have closed, and many other places of public and private resort, now silent and neglected, but capable or being repaired and reanimated with a richer and brighter life than that of former days. E CHAPTER VIII. The Negro's "best Friends."-Sinister complexion of Politics.-Kindly [CHARLESTON, S.C.-Nov. 10 to Nov. 14.] APART from the passing excitement of the elections just over, and the disappointment of the white population at the voting of the negroes en masse for the Republican or Radical party, the general tone of social life in Charleston is kindly and temperate, and all classes of society are working together with considerable harmony for mutual good. The negro is beset at present by two parties who claim to be his "best friends." The Republicans, who came in with the close of the war, appeal to him as his best if not only friends; and, looking at the political issues of the war, and the decree of emancipation, with its elaborate guarantees of reconstruction, the negroes could not but regard the Republican party politically as their friends. Nor can it be denied that the organs of the Federal Government have laboured to introduce institutions for the moral and social benefit of the negroes, and, as far as their limited means would allow, have befriended that large portion of the population. I have not found any one on the other side who is prepared to blame the negroes for voting almost universally as they did in the elections which raised General Grant to the Presidentship, or who appears to have expected that they would or should have been other than fast adherents of their emancipators. But the political agitators and hungry spoil-and-office hunters of the party are accused of appealing to the ignorance and passions of the negro population of telling them that the white people of the State are eagerly seeking an opportunity of restoring slavery, which they have certainly no wish to do, and which they could not do even if they would; and now, after five years of this, it is considered hard that the negroes-when there are great public objects of economy, protection from jobbery and corruption, and a sound and healthy administration of the affairs of the State to promote, H in which the blacks are as closely interested as others-should cast their votes in a body against the great majority of the white population, and terrorise such of their own colour as are dispose d to act differently. This feeling breaks out violently just now in bar-rooms and at street corners, and is often expressed more quietly and reasonably, yet firmly, in private circles. Many seem ready to despair of the negro as a politician, while others talk of a " war of races" and other disorders sure to arise. The feeling is no doubt all the stronger since the evils of "carpetbagging" and negro demagoguery are apparent to respectable men of both parties, and, while violently denounced on one side, are not denied, but sometimes admitted and deplored, on the other. Though politics in South Carolina thus wear a somewhat sinister complexion, yet there is a healthy action and a sober practical opinion underneath the surface that promise beneficial results. The issues left by the war are being rapidly closed; the Reform Union, which has figured prominently in the late elections as the organ of the native white people of the State, recognizes fully the civil and political equality of the negroes not only as an election platform, but as the fundamental law of the United States; this position is likely to be maintained, and may be expected soon to bring about in this, as in other Southern States, a better balance of parties. Meanwhile social bonds are being knit together, and many ameliorative influences are quietly at work. The ladies, who had a long apprenticeship of self-devotion during the war, are exerting themselves to give work, and to sell the work of poor needlewomen of both races. Nearly all the old charities of Charleston remain in operation, and schools and missions are doing much to improve the population. By a law passed five years before the war a public school system was introduced into South Carolina, which became well developed in Charleston; and now the State has passed under the new free-school principle, embodied in the Constitutions of the Southern States under the Acts of Reconstruction. It is only by degrees that this system can get into general operation, and, indeed, it is doubtful whether the ground lost in education during the war has yet been recovered. The official statistics for 1860 give 20,716 pupils in 757 public schools, whereas they show for 1869 only 381 public schools and 16,418 pupils. The new law is now, however, being put into operation; the State has appropriated 50,000 dollars to this object, and, aided by the Peabody Fund and other voluntary contributions, South Carolina may be expected soon to be tolerably well furnished with the means of education for the whole population. Charleston is probably more advanced in this respect than any other part of the State, and the education of negro children is already quite a |