FIBER INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES. 21 





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and with the employment of the finest labor-saving agricultural 

 implements in the world, the conditions are again changed, and are 

 now favorable for American agriculture to re-establish this industry, 

 and to make good a declining foreign supply. Our farmers are 

 ready for the work, but they have not only lost their skill and cun- 

 ning in producing the straw and preparing the fiber for the spinner, 

 but new and more economical methods must be adopted to place the 

 culture on a solid basis. 



A million acres of flax are grown for seed annually, but the growth 

 of flax for seed and flax for fiber are two very different things; 

 moreover, Old World 

 methods do not coin- 

 cide with the progress- 

 ive ideas of the edu- 

 cated farmers of the 

 United States, for the 

 peasant class does not 

 exist in this country. 

 A practice essentially 

 American must be fol- 

 lowed in order to make 

 the culture profitable, 

 and to equalize the 

 difference in wages on 

 the two sides of the 

 Atlantic. This differ- 

 ence is more apparent 

 than real, for it can 

 be readily overcome 

 by intelligently di- 

 rected effort, by dif- 

 ference in soil fer- 

 tility and rentals, and 

 especially by the use 

 of certain forms of 

 labor-saving machines that already have been devised and are being 

 rapidly improved. The " American practice," then, means, first, 

 an intelligent practice, with a view to economy of effort and involv- 

 ing the use of machinery in the place of plodding foreign meth- 

 ods; and, second, the co-operation of farm labor and capital to the 

 end of systematizing the work — i. e., the farmers of a community 

 growing the flax, and capital, represented by a central mill, turn- 

 ing the straw when grown into a grade of fiber that the spinners 

 can afford to purchase. Here is the solution of the flax problem 



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Hackling Flax. 



