140 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



but it is quite possible. This is not as much as the difference be- 

 tween the total crops of 1910 and 1911. The crop for 1912 bids 

 fair to show an increase of a million bales in excess of 1911, and 

 with such an increase the price of the crop has not declined to 

 any great extent, showing that the world's requirements are grow- 

 ing with each year. Edward Atkinson, the great statistical ex- 

 pert, has stated that it will take 420,000,000 bales of cotton to 

 clothe all the human family up to the present standard of the most 

 civilized nations. Civilization is itself judged by the clothing it 

 wears as well as by what it eats and reads. If the one is coarse 

 the other is apt to be. 



Fifty years ago wool was the principal material used in the 

 manufacture of the clothing of the world. Today nearly ten, bil- 

 lion pounds of cotton lint are spun, and woven entirely for the 

 needs of the civilized people of the world in making clothing. This 

 is more than double all the other textiles combined. Nine states 

 produce four-fifths of the world's supply of cotton. Yet in 1910 

 there was exported from the United States more than one-half of 

 the cotton crop, unmanufactured. While we exported only a little 

 over thirty-three millions of dollars' worth of cotton goods and 

 manufactured articles, we imported twice as much manufactured 

 cotton goods from the foreign countries to whom we furnished the 

 raw cotton, or over sixty-six millions of dollars' worth. What do 

 we Missourians do with our cotton? We ship it to St. Louis or 

 Memphis, thence to some Atlantic seaport, thence to Liverpool or 

 Manchester, England, where it is spun and woven. It is then re- 

 turned through the ordinary channels of trade, perhaps to New 

 York or Baltimore, whence it is distributed to the various jobbers 

 of dry goods at St. Louis or Kansas City, and by them scattered 

 out to the country stores and is purchased back by us Missourians, 

 who produced the lint and shipped it more than half way around 

 the globe to get it to ourselves in condition fit to wear, while our 

 own beautiful Ozark mountain streams flow on to the gulf unde- 

 veloped and our coal mines go unworked. We have right here in 

 Missouri the capacity for both growing and manufacturing the 

 cotton. With the development of this cotton industry we can and 

 will revolutionize the Ozark regions, fill the valleys with cotton 

 fields and crown the hills with factories. We can save the freight 

 twice across the ocean, furnish our own citizens with profitable 

 labor, and laugh at the European spinner and weaver. Do you 

 know that during our Civil war the United States was almost in- 



