THE PRESENT COTTON SYSTEM 181 



diversification. It is not only that cotton farmers have 

 too little income distributed over the year from other 

 crops, but that they have too many things to buy. "While 

 we need and must have a better system of financing the 

 cotton crop of the South," said Harvey Jordan, president 

 of the Southern Cotton Association in 1906, "yet I tell 

 you, the strongest financial institution for every farmer 

 is a well-filled corncrib and smokehouse." Henry W. 

 Grady, Seaman A. Knapp, Walter Hines Page, Booker 

 T. Washington, all of the South's good friends who have 

 been close to things of the soil, have talked and dreamed 

 of the diversification of production on cotton farms. Yet 

 no canon has been more persistently preached and more 

 consistently breached than diversification. The old South 

 had agricultural reformers and experimenters 17 who 

 railed at the one-crop systems based on cotton and to- 

 bacco. In 1876 a cotton factor 18 wrote a pamphlet to his 

 friends, the cotton growers, in which he plead for diversifi- 

 cation in a strongly contemporary tone : 



We cannot break off from old ways all at once; but we are 

 untrue to ourselves and our children if we do not make the 

 trial, when our conditions show that the old ways are un- 

 profitable. The course to our mind is plain: Plant only as 

 much land in cotton as you can cultivate and manure thor- 

 oughly; and raise on your own place everything that is 

 needed to feed your family and stock. Such luxuries for the 

 table as must needs be bought, let them be provided for 

 from your surplus butter, eggs, poultry, and dried fruit. You 

 will then find that when your crop is sold you will have a 



17 See A. O. Craven, "The Agricultural Reformers of the Ante 

 Bellum South," American Historical Review, XXXIII, 302-14. 



18 W. C. Grandy and Sons, Factors, The Cotton Question Pre- 

 sented to the Cotton Trade, p. 28. 



