186 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



merchant are afraid to trust stock, poultry, grain, and 

 feed crops to many of the renters. Grain may be eaten 

 or fed to stock; pigs may take to the swamp or cane 

 breaks; and blooded stock may die. But cotton is food 

 for neither man nor beast. Some tenants may be inclined 

 to steal, but the crop lien is a form of restrictive credit, 

 limiting the sale of the cotton. Cotton is a bulky product 

 difficult to cart away ; it has to be delivered at a gin, and 

 it is at the gin that a careful landlord checks up. For 

 this reason the system has grown up in some localities 

 of charging a cash rent, say $10 an acre, for corn while 

 accepting a fourth share of the cotton. The effect of 

 this form of rent has been to restrict the production of 

 corn. It does not take the tenant long to realize first, that 

 he must pay for his corn out of his cotton, and second, 

 that the landlord is sharing his risks of production on 

 cotton, but that he himself carries the whole load when 

 he raises corn. 



The crux of the matter may be summed up by saying 

 that cotton made the one-crop system because it is the 

 one cash crop. As W. J. Spillman has said, cotton has 

 been the only product sufficiently high-priced to permit 

 its shipment to distant markets. Oats and corn are too 

 cheap, and wheat and hay meet with climatic difficulties. 

 At any time at any place in the South, cotton is the one 

 commodity that can be exchanged for cash be it much 

 or little. Every little town is a primary market, and cot- 

 ton buyers from interior markets and cotton quotations 

 from New Orleans and New York are ubiquitous. The 

 cotton market is a world market possibly the world's 

 best organized market for any agricultural product. For 

 one time in her history, when the New York Cotton Ex- 

 change closed at the outbreak of the World War, the 



