COTTON 367 



For more advanced communities the questions which 

 arise are easy to state but exceedingly difficult to answer. 

 Two questions cover the whole field; they are: How can 

 the cottons grown be so improved as to be worth more 

 money? and, How can they be made more prolific so 

 that the results of growing them will be better for the 

 grower ? 



The answers to both questions lie in the sphere of 

 thought which I have attempted to indicate. 



But there is one quality more, not named by Mr. 

 Cobb, and yet I think the most important of all to 

 growers and to spinners. I refer to uniformity. In all 

 the qualities a spinner wants in cotton, viz., fineness, 

 strength, length, adhesiveness, colour, and freedom from 

 waste, in each and every case uniformity is essential 

 if the quality is to 'be worth money. To be partly fine 

 is to be coarse; to be partly strong is to be weak; to be 

 irregular in length or colour or anything else is to be 

 so far poorer and less valuable. Also irregularity in 

 plant habit is a certain bar to a big production. Now 

 I believe that this virtue of uniformity, this sine qua non, 

 without which no goodness is good, I believe that this 

 is now, for the first time in the history of cotton, within 

 reach of attainment. Uniformity can only be hoped for 

 from plants which will breed pure. A pure plant may 

 conceivably fail in uniformity, but without purity uni- 

 formity is inconceivable. Now it is well known to all 

 students of cotton growing that the work of Mr. 

 Lawrence Balls in Egypt, and of others elsewhere, has 

 shown that it is possible to cultivate cotton on a com- 

 mercial scale from pure parents. There is a good deal 

 of evidence that purity in itself gives value to cotton. 

 The best practical cotton growers of my acquaintance 

 attach the first importance to purity, even where they 

 have not hit on Mr. Balls's system of securing it. The 

 experiments of the Americans with Egyptian seed in 

 Arizona bear a curious testimony to this principle. So 

 long as they used imported seed the results were poor. 

 But by selection or by accident they struck on an indi- 

 genous offshoot from the original Mitafifi. Some of 

 the cotton from this is as much superior to the best 

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