THE COTTON CULTURE COMPLEX 317 



sors are good swivel chair farmers," are authentic 

 expressions of folk attitudes. 



In industry the inefficient processes tend to die with the 

 failure of firms which practice them. The differential costs 

 mean profits to the technically alert firm; to the back- 

 ward concern, losses. Cotton producers, like steel pro- 

 ducers, fail because of differential costs of production ; 

 but unlike steel mills they continue to produce and with 

 the same inefficient methods. How can this be? If the 

 cotton grower fails to produce a crop sufficient to pay 

 his store bill, the bill is transferred to the next year's 

 account. The merchant does not expect improved meth- 

 ods to enable his debtor to settle; instead, he hopes for 

 the price of cotton to go up. If the tenant gets snowed 

 under with debts, he moves and cancels them. If too many 

 cotton farmers fail to pay up their accounts with the 

 supply merchant, he goes bankrupt and thus shifts the 

 load of inefficient cotton farmers back to the wholesaler. 

 The landlord and the large planter are in a similar situa- 

 tion. Tenants in debt are turnips without blood. A debt 

 hanging over a tenant may prove his greatest incentive 

 to mobility. Rather than take the chance of securing 

 poorer tenants, landlords sometimes forget part of the 

 unpaid bills. Poor cotton farmers are thus protected by 

 the semi-benevolent despotism of the cotton system. After 

 a fashion, in good crops and in bad, they continue to 

 survive. And with them their inefficient practices continue. 

 They do not diversify, they are subject to all the fluctua- 

 tions of the market, and they fail, but they continue to 

 exist as cotton producers. 



It must be said that to make the southern farmer 

 merely an efficient cotton producer will not solve the prob- 

 lem. T. N. Jones rightly says, "There are those in this 



