212 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



puts him in one of two very unfortunate predicaments. He 

 must either violate one of the fundamental rules of natural 

 law and thereby incur the wrath of God, deprive himself of 

 happiness, and his state of citizens, or he must observe that 

 rule at the risk of imposing misery upon his offspring, and 

 pauperism, and hence crime upon his community; yes, in 

 thousands of instances cotton has put man in this dilemma. 13 



T. M. Young, an English traveler who visited the 

 South in the early 1900's, has left his impressions of 

 the housing and clothing of cotton farmers in North 

 Carolina : 



Dotted about at wide intervals are the wooden cabins of 

 the peasantry. Some of these tiny dwellings are whitewashed, 

 but most of them have never known either paint or whitewash, 

 and never will know them. Very poor and mean-looking they 

 are, but the blaze of roses which you may often see beside 

 the doors and the space and purity around them redeem them 

 from the appearance of squalor. It is in homes and amid 

 surroundings such as these that the population has been bred 

 from which the southern mills are drawing their labor, and 

 the people have that fine physique which one finds in Irish- 

 men bred in even the poorest country cabins. 



In Piedmont sections [ I was told that] farmers brought up 

 large families for almost nothing; the cost of clothing where 

 men work in a cotton shirt and a pair of cotton trousers for 

 nine months in the year, was very much less than in the 

 North ; and fuel when it was needed, could be had for nothing 

 in the nearest wood. Many of these people hardly ever saw 

 money before the mill started, and now according to my 

 informant, they hardly know how to spend it. At this mill 

 they were paid in cash every week end. Much of what they 

 earned was "wasted on tawdry finery." ] 



13 W. R. Henry, Cotton and the Commission Merchants, p. 12. 



14 The American Cotton Industry, p. 15. 



