362 COTTON 



indifferent quality. Scientific principles have been ignored 

 in the past. It is to be hoped that the new efforts now 

 being made will produce good results, but I fear that the 

 Government are still very far from recognizing that 

 liberal expenditure on scientific work in cotton growing 

 and in agriculture generally is the only foundation on 

 which prosperity for India can be built. The stoiy of 

 cotton in Egypt is happier, but it teaches the same lesson. 

 Apparently its early successes were largely due to the 

 strong hand of Mohammed Ali compelling the use of the 

 best seed and the best methods of growing known in his 

 day. And subsequently I think that Egyptian cottons 

 have just maintained a balance between the tendencies 

 of Nature to deteriorate and the efforts of human agents 

 to improve. 



In the newer cotton growing countries which, as it 

 happens, are nearly all in the tropics, and thus directly 

 connected with this Congress I am sure that success 

 depends entirely on the application of the best scientific 

 learning to what is necessarily a very difficult problem. 



The difficulty of growing good cotton is due to several 

 causes. First of all there is no natural cotton that is 

 good. All its good qualities have to be given to it by 

 human agency; or, at least, have to be caught and kept 

 by human agents whenever Nature chances to give some- 

 thing good. Otherwise Nature will hurriedly destroy the 

 good characteristic. But on the other side there is the 

 curious difficulty of knowing what is good. Cotton is not 

 a food or drink, whose merits can be appreciated by the 

 grower himself. Cotton, again, is not capable of valua- 

 tion by chemical analysis. Nor can it be readily and 

 easily tested for quality in its natural state. He who 

 would grow good cotton is confronted with the difficulty 

 of knowing what is good. The question how good 

 qualities can be added to or increased in vegetable 

 growths is, I suppose, in itself a problem for agro- 

 nomists. But in cotton the question that has first to be 

 settled is : What does the spinner want ? And, con- 

 versely, how is the grower with a handful of new plants 

 to judge their relative merits ? Then there is the further 

 difficulty that the spinner can only answer the question 



