THE PRESENT COTTON SYSTEM 195 



nearly a pound and a half for each bale of the press re- 

 ceipts at New Orleans. 31 



If it were left to be determined by the nature of cot- 

 ton itself rather than by the financial weaknesses of the 

 growers, the marketing of cotton might well be evenly 

 distributed throughout the year. Cotton, as a matter of 

 fact, keeps better in storage than any other farm crop. 

 "Nearly all banks," writes Gilbert H. Collings, "are will- 

 ing to advance money on cotton at liberal terms if the 

 cotton is properly stored and insured. In fact they prefer 

 it to real estate and will accept it as collateral as readily 

 as government bonds." l2 Most warehouses, however, be- 

 long to mills, middlemen, factors, and the non-farmer 

 group. One-half the warehouses in Texas, for instance, 

 are located in two cities, Galveston and Houston. Georgia 

 has the best distributed system of warehouses, but in most 

 areas warehouses offer comparatively poor service for 

 high charges to farmers because of the small volume of 

 business. 33 



There exists justification for Carl Williams' 34 state- 

 ment that "cotton has been and still largely is a city 

 man's crop" in the fact that cotton classing is a techni- 

 cal art of which the farmer is ignorant. Since cotton 

 cannot be used on the farm or by retail consumer, there 

 exists no possibility of the growers' dealing with indi- 

 vidual consumers. The modern cotton trade, then, is or- 

 ganized on the basis of assembling a large quantity of 

 fibre of certain qualities to supply vast manufacturing 

 establishments. There exists, thus, for the cotton pro- 



31 Report of New Orleans Cotton Exchange, 1919. 



32 The Production of Cotton, p. 155. 33 Ibid., pp. 156-57. 



34 President American Cotton Growers' Exchange, before Agri- 

 cultural Conference, 1924. Press Release. 





