264 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



They raised 20 bales, and had to hire some of it picked out. 

 They made nothing, but were able to pay some on the mule, 

 settle up the store account, and buy a few clothes. 



More children, more moving, more debts at the store, and 

 a mortgage on the mules, the wagon, and about everything 

 the man had. Smith took a notion that he ought to have a 

 piece of land. He bought a little place, five acres, with a 

 sort of a house on it, and moved in, paying part down. He 

 had his mules and his boy that could plow and another that 

 could almost reach the plow handles, and a wife with still 

 a lot of work in her. The place was too small and he let the 

 mortgage take it and moved on to another farm the next 

 year. 



Disaster overtook him that year. Crops failed, prices 

 failed, the new landlord lived in town and didn't care about 

 John Smith. He sold him out, took his mules, his corn, his 

 all. John Smith was back where he started, with four chil- 

 dren, two beds, a few other pieces of furniture and two 

 dogs. He went back on a third-crop basis, and began again 

 the hard, hopeless task of getting himself on a paying basis. 

 History repeated its grim cycle, more work, more children, 

 more debt, more moving from place to place. 



And now the John Smith today. Of the world's goods he 

 has : three mules, two pigs, 1 1 chickens, a wagon, four plows, 

 harness, an old buggy, a few squalid pieces of furniture, a 

 wife, seven children, two cur dogs, and is in debt $1,400. 

 This year he has spent at the store $250. He will make 12 

 bales of cotton, half of which he will get, and turn over to 

 the man to whom he owes the money the storekeeper, etc. 



Three prosperous years are immediately behind him, in 

 the common estimate of the conditions of the farmer. He has 

 not moved in that time. He was $600 in debt three years 

 ago. Half his new indebtedness is chargeable to an epidemic 

 of typhoid fever that struck down six members of the family 

 at one time in 1919. The entire working force of the family 



