208 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



part of foreign buyers, for the purpose of breaking down 

 prices and holding cotton growers to starvation wages. For 

 a hundred years the English cotton manufacturers especially, 

 and the English Government as well, have put forth their 

 utmost power to break the price of cotton in America and 

 to produce cotton in other parts of the world in order to 

 lessen their dependence upon the South. 4 



England's fear of expensive raw cotton and her hope 

 of escape are both based on the low standards of living 

 of the more backward people. A great part of her textiles 

 have been cheap cotton cloth exported to China and 

 India. When the price of American upland middling 

 reaches certain heights, not only the profits but the 

 exports themselves are in danger of being cut off. Eng- 

 land has sought to avoid this difficulty by attempting 

 to stimulate cotton growing by the Empire's supply of 

 cheap labor. The British Cotton Growing Association, 

 founded in 1902, has been granted subsidies by the Im- 

 perial Government up until 1916. "The Association be- 

 gan operations in West Africa by engaging a number of 

 experts from the United States. . . . Large areas were 

 acquired and put under American cotton on the planta- 

 tion principle with native labor, but it was eventually 

 found that this method was not likely to succeed under 

 West African conditions ; and therefore the policy adopted 

 was to encourage cotton growing as an industry . . . 

 conducted by the native on his own land." 1 ' This area 

 was later abandoned; cotton culture was introduced into 

 other cheap labor areas, and by 1924 the new fields un- 



4 "Fifty Years of Southern Progress," Dec. 11, 1924, p. 336. 



5 W. H. Johnson, Cotton and Its Production, p. x. 



