EVOLUTION OF THE COTTON SYSTEM 79 



ample of an adjustment of man to land and of race to 

 race accepted from history as a social heritage. The 

 plantation possesses an influence in southern life greater 

 than its extent. It tends to set the mode by which the 

 human factors in cotton shall be regulated. In times of 

 prosperity investment in farms as plantations has tended 

 to draw more workers into tenancy. That plantations 

 should come to be vested more and more in the control of 

 corporations would not surprise one student of history. 

 "Its concentration of labor under skilled management," 

 writes U. B. Phillips, "made the plantation system with 

 its overseers, foremen, blacksmiths, carpenters, hostlers, 

 cooks, nurses, plow-hands, and hoe-hands practically the 

 factory system applied to agriculture." 70 But more than 

 any factory the plantation is devoted to the production 

 of a staple from which it cannot escape. It is this devo- 

 tion to cotton which made the plantation in the begin- 

 ning, caused its partial break-up after the Civil War, and 

 holds it in hazard today. For the plantation cannot 

 diversify ; it never has diversified but once and then under 

 the stress of war. It must have its staple cash crop, and 

 it must produce that crop regardless of the effect on the 

 market. Herein lies the second fact, the menace of the 

 plantation to the whole cotton system. It does not di- 

 versify, it does not reduce acreage. The fact that it may 

 produce cotton efficiently does not alter the charge that 

 it produces too much cotton. By depressing cotton prices 

 it not only threatens the human factors in the whole 

 cotton system, it threatens its own existence. The planta- 

 tion even more than the average farmer has all its eggs in 

 one basket. And that basket is subject to the hazards 

 of the weather, the weevil, and the market. 



"Decadence of the Plantation," Annals of the American Acad- 

 emy, XXXV (1910), 37. 



