28o READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



raising. Taken year after year, the culture of cotton did not yield 

 such large profits as would have resulted from a diversified system 

 of farming, and it often proved the occasion of loss. Thousands 

 of planters heavily in debt had their crops pledged to the cotton 

 buyers long before they were harvested, possibly even before they 

 were planted. 



Notwithstanding these failures, the high prices which resulted 

 when there was a failure of the crop elsewhere furnished the 

 planter an incentive to continue the "one-crop" system, and to 

 rely on his cotton crop to pay off the debts which its exclusive 

 cultivation had brought upon him. "As I have no disposition to 

 gamble, or invest in lotteries, I do not raise cotton," wrote one 

 Arkansas planter who had become disgusted with the speculative 

 character of cotton raising and had gone over to a diversified 

 system of farming. 



But it was the ease with which the planter could remove to 

 other lands when the old plantation fields had become exhausted 

 that furnished the principal reason for the failure to adopt an 

 intensive system of agriculture at the South. The comparatively 

 sparse population of this part of the country, due to the fact that 

 the lack of respect for labor there discouraged immigration, lim- 

 ited the demand for new lands largely to those who were pursu- 

 ing the system of cultivation by exhausting the old lands. The 

 limited competition for land therefore kept the price down to 

 where it was cheaper to take up these new tracts than to keep 

 up the fertility of the old fields, and this fact permitted the ex- 

 tensive system of cultivation to continue longer without being felt 

 than would have been the case had conditions been otherwise. 

 No planter thought of holding only such land as he wished to 

 cultivate at one time. In taking up a new tract of land, he did 

 it with the intention of cultivating only a part of it and then 

 "turning it out" and bringing into cultivation another portion 

 of the plantation. Of the land in farms in the old cotton states, 

 the Carolinas and Georgia, over 70 per cent was unimproved in 

 the decade 18 50- 1860, while New England and the Middle 

 States, with less fertile soils, showed approximately two-thirds of 

 their farm lands to be under cultivation. The habit of considering 



