692 OLEOMAKGAEINB. 



here from Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, and I would 

 be glad tu hear from all of them; and I hope tke committee will cut me 

 off in time to give these gentlemen ample opportunity to be heard. 



I desire to be entirely candid with the committee. I have a little 

 stock in a cotton-seed oil mill, and was appointed by the Oil Mill Asso- 

 ciation of the State of Texas to come here as a delegate. But my 

 interest as a farmer, raising the seed itself, is fifty times as great as my 

 interest in the oil mill. In ordinarily good seasons I raise about a 

 thousand bales of cotton a year, and this question affects me vitally. 



Gentlemen, every section of this country within the last three years 

 has become prosperous, except the cotton raising South. The wave of 

 prosperity has never struck that section. Its people are as poor to day 

 as they ever have been. And why? They have been making cotton 

 at 4J and 5 cents per pound. No man can do that and do more than 

 barely live. It is a life and death struggle for his very existence. The 

 manufacturing interests have prospered ; the cattle interests have pros- 

 pered; all interests have prospered, except the man that raises cotton 

 and sells it at 4J and 5 cents. 



There has lately been a little spurt in the price of cotton, owing to an 

 exceedingly short crop. But, gentlemen, the farmers of the South, the 

 men who till the ground, did not get the benefit of that fise. They are 

 poor people; they were in debt to the merchants. They had to sell 

 their cotton early in the season for 6 cents; and the merchants and 

 the bankers and the speculators have reaped the benefit of the rise in 

 cotton, and not the men that made it. 



I desire to show you briefly what a cotton farmer has to contend with. 

 I mean a tenant farmer. The great bulk of them are negroes. 



He can cultivate about 40 acres of land. Say that he puts half of 

 that in corn. The corn will only furnish bread for his family and feed 

 his pair of mules or horses and raise the pigs for his family. Very few 

 of them ever sell corn in the South. Now, on the other 20 acres he 

 raises 7 bales of cotton. That is a little over one-third of a bale to the 

 acre, and that is a good average for the whole South. Those 7 bales of 

 cotton, at 5 cents a pound, are worth $175. From those 7 bales he gets 

 3 tons of seed, worth $10 per ton. That is $35. Then his whole crop 

 nets him $210. But he pays from $2.50 to $3, say $2.50, an acre rent 

 on the 40 acres. That takes out $100, leaving him net for the services 

 of himself, a pair of mules, a wagon, and all of his family of women 

 and children working during the fall picking this cotton, 30 cents a 

 day for the whole- family. 



Now, you are having strikes all over the North by men who earn from 

 $2 to $5 a day. And yet here are a class of people who are striving to 

 live and support a family upon 30 cents a day for the whole family. 

 These are the people that 1 represent before you. 



Last Christmas eve, a year ago, I received a telephone message from 

 my plantation manager. My plantations are near Hern. I live at 

 Dallas, 140 miles from there. I received a telephone message that the 

 town was full of my negroes, and that they wanted money to buy a 

 bottle of whisky. They did not have it. Now, these negroes had 

 worked faithfully. I had no complaint to make. In the winter storms 

 and in the heat of summer they had bent to the plow and the hoe, and 

 they had lived on cornbread and bacon and cheap molasses throughout 

 the year. They had made 985 bales of cotton, and yet they could not 

 buy a bottle of whisky to get drunk on at Christmas. Well, I tele- 

 phoned my manager to buy every one of them a bottle, on the ground 



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