114 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



manding elaborate statistical analysis by the economic 

 technician. It has been carefully presented by Professor 

 H. L. Moore in a monograph on Forecasting the Yield 

 and Price of Cotton. 12 It is sufficient to say that demand 

 as conceived by the economist is a very elastic thing, 

 absorbing large crops offered at low prices in a surpris- 

 ingly short time and measurably reducing the rate of 

 consumption of small crops offered at high prices. New 

 uses for Cotton, as in automobile tires, are likely to be 

 discovered at any time. Higher standards of living and 

 new social customs among remote peoples are an un- 

 predictable though no less important factor. The in- 

 creasing use of silk and the advent of new artificial 

 fabrics like rayon cause a lessening in demand. Owing 

 to the vanishing forests, rayon will have to be made 

 from short lint cotton. In the long run the manufacture 

 of rayon may come to be regarded as the substitution 

 of an expensive technical process for nature's chemistry of 

 soil and sunlight. But increased uses of cotton through- 

 out the world await the raising of the standards of living 

 of many peoples. As Honorable Adam M. Byrd of Mis- 

 sissippi told his fellow-members of the House, the cotton 

 farmer's way to prosperity depends on his inalienable 

 right "to displace the fig leaf in all the ends of the 

 world by the cotton shirt." 3 It was Ambassador Wu 

 Ting Fang of China who charmingly and hopefully ad- 

 monished his hosts, the Southern Textile Manufacturers, 

 that if his countrymen should decide to add another inch 

 to the tails of their shirts it would require the whole 

 cotton crop of the South. 



12 Published in 1917. 



13 Address in U. S. House of Representatives, Feb. 24, 1905. 



