HOW THE COTTON FARMER LIVES 213 



Daniel J. Sully of Providence, Rhode Island, was a 

 cotton speculator who cornered the market in 1903-4 

 and pushed cotton to the high level of 17 cents. He had 

 made several trips through the South before he failed 

 and expressed great . interest in the conditions of the 

 cotton farmer. Writing in a popular magazine in 1909 

 he assigns the lowest standard of living in America to 

 the cotton grower: 



American cotton planters, proprietors of the greatest gold- 

 producing staple in the world are poor. They are in practical 

 servitude . . . themselves absolutely subservient and the 

 poorest paid toilers in the United States. 



Our greatest asset is our greatest humiliation. Cotton is 

 king, but it is a badly served monarch. ... It does not 

 enrich but rather impoverishes the Southland. An enormous 

 profit is made somewhere in the progress of the cotton to 

 consumer. Every year cotton goods to the value of nearly 

 six billion dollars are turned out from the 125,000,000 

 spindles in the world. But the poor farmer in the cotton 

 fields sees but a pitiful part of the multiplying fortunes at- 

 tending the migration of cotton goods around the earth. 



The ordinary grower of cotton cultivates twenty acres, 

 producing one-half a bale to the acre. Unfortunately in too 

 great a majority of cases he is a tenant farmer. Of his ten 

 bales, the result of his year's toil, five must go to the owner 

 of the land. The working farmer for his product gets, we 

 will say, ten cents a pound or fifty dollars a bale; his twelve 

 months of effort and expense bringing him in a gross revenue 

 of $250. This is an insignificant total for the men who among 

 others produce the commodity that controls the world. 



Out of that $250 he must provide for his family, himself, 

 and his mule, and make provision for the ensuing times of 

 planting and cultivating. Fully sixty-five per cent of Ameri- 

 can cotton crop is produced by this struggling method. 



The whole world is combined against the southern farm- 



