HOW THE COTTON FARMER LIVES 207 



Clayton (interrupting) : "I challenge that statement. I 

 know something about it and I know it is not correct." 



Burleson: "If it pays so large a per cent to the farmer 

 and so small a per cent to the spinner, how do you account 

 for the fact that the planter of cotton is almost invariably 

 a poor man, while the spinner is almost uniformly a wealthy 

 man." 



Lovering: "I should dispute that with you. With 625 mil- 

 lions going into the South for its cotton crop, who gets it?" 



Clayton: "The gentleman's statement as to the profits de- 

 rived by the southern planters from raising cotton is so 

 absurd that it would make the ordinary plantation mule down 

 in Alabama or Texas laugh, and the mule is a solemn animal 

 and does not generally laugh. 



"I was born on a cotton plantation and raised on one. I 

 know something of the hardships and disasters that come to 

 the cotton grower, the risks that he takes, the hardships he 

 endures, and the many disasters that often come to his crop. 



" . . the cotton plant is the most tender field plant that 

 grows. It is susceptible to more disasters and requires more 

 of human manual labor to produce it than anything else. . . . 

 You cannot make cotton with machinery as you can wheat 

 and corn and other crops." 



This clash of interests is more acute between the 

 American growers and the English spinners. Southern 

 merchants and bankers have come to feel that whenever 

 cotton goes high enough to furnish an adequate standard 

 of living for its producers, the English manufacturers 

 begin to talk about cotton famine and to encourage the 

 growing of cotton in the colonies. A writer in the Manu- 

 facturers 9 Record, organ of southern finance, expresses 

 these views : 



There is probably no other crop in the world against which 

 there has been such a tremendous fight, especially on the 



