KISKS OF THE COTTON MARKET 109 



planter in the 1860's. 1 The feeling was more forcibly 

 expressed by a North Carolina pamphleteer writing in 

 the picturesque phraseology of 1883: 



There is another view of this subject, we now call to the 

 attention of the farmers, thousands of whom are earnest and 

 devout Christians. 



The man who will jeopardize the happiness of his wife and 

 little ones and deprive them of bread, by a cast of the die, 

 or the turn of a card at the faro table they deem lost to all 

 feeling of morality and swiftly bound for hell. 



Yet, year after year, they hazard the happiness and live- 

 lihood of their fond wives and children by giving mortgages 

 upon their homes and liens upon their crops, "trusting to 

 chances," that they will make a good cotton crop and be able 

 to pay them off, that "other countries will fail in the produc- 

 tion of cotton this year, and ours will, consequently, be 

 higher," that labor will be cheaper than last year, that there 

 will be not too much nor too little rain, that there will be no 

 hail storms, and a hundred contingencies, the happening or 

 not happening of which would be sufficient to take the bread 

 out of their families' mouths and deprive them of a home. 



[This] "trusting to chance" ... is a higher species of 

 gambling than that of the man who bets $10 that a 48 will 

 be thrown or the ace turned; in this respect the two differ. 

 Do they differ otherwise? Let each man answer for himself. 2 



Within the memory of many southern farmers the 

 price of a standard five-hundred-pound bale of cotton 

 has varied from $35 to $200. Taken year after year, it 

 is doubtful, as Hammond says, whether cotton yields as 

 large returns as would result from a safer, more diver- 



1 Cited in Hammond, The Cotton Industry, p. 87. 

 2 W. R. Henry, Cotton and the Commission Merchants, p. 21. 

 Pamphlet. 



