gmertca, , ?|emp, an& JUapoleon - Vote Hemp

Hemp,Flax, and Iron: The Amelrican Viewher iron, our sailing vessels would have been immobile piles oflumber.Take, as an example, a forty-four-gun frigate of the "Constitution"class, the only kind of large sailing vessel with whichmost of us are now at all familiar. She needed two suits of sails,each suit amounting to about three-quarters of an acre inextent. 2 Fully rigged, she had one hundred tons of hemp ropeaboard. Iron? Not counting the anchors or any of the cannon,muskets, or ammunition, a ship of the "Constitution" classneeded seventy-five tons of iron. 3Not so vital, but considered necessary to a normally comfortablelife, were the thousands of yards of Russia's finer linentextiles that streamed to the ports of America every year. Beforeour South and England's Midlands taught the world tocast aside linen for cotton, Russia's linens—from rough ravensduckfor a sailor's trousers to delicate diaper for the merchantprince'ssilver-gleaming table—were commo n fabrics inAmerica's ports.Hem p andflax,of course, grew all over the world, but it wasRussia that produced more of each than any other nation. 4 Asfor quality, no other hemp seemed quite so worthy in the eye ofthe sailor as Russian, and while—say—Silesian linen might bemore noted for beauty of workmanship, all agreed that no flaxwas superior to Russia's and no linens sturdier than hers. 5Furthermore, a piece of linen ma y have been manufacturedoutside Russia, but that was no reason to believe that its flaxhadn't once tossed its blue flowers in a Muscovite breeze.Russia's exports of rawflaxsupplied the linen industries ofseveral European nations. 6