6 COTTON 
hides, skins, ete., etc..—the entire contribution, ex- 
cept cotton, furnished the outside world by every 
American farm, ranch, dairy, fruit farm and gar- 
den, from Maine to California, from Michigan to 
Texas, from Alaska to Hawaii, including the 
South’s own not unimportant share—take all this, 
and with the proceeds of one year’s cotton and cot- 
tonseed exports, the Southern cotton-grower can 
buy the whole colossal aggregation, still have a 
surplus of several hundred thousand left as pin 
money, and be ready to start business again with 
the more than $200,000,000 he gets annually for 
supplying the 25,000,000 spindles of our own 
country. 
“If Europe during the past five years,” says 
Mr. R. H. Edmonds, “had gathered together every 
dollar’s worth of gold produced in all the mines of 
the earth and shipped it to the South, it would still 
have fallen $206,000,000 short of paying for that 
part of the cotton crop the South has sent beyond 
the seas.” 
COTTON BOTH CLOTHES AND FEEDS MANKIND 
In many ways cotton stands out unique among 
all the plants that men grow. Not only is it the 
only crop which has greatly changed the destinies 
of nations and continents (but for cotton, slav- 
ery would not have so flourished in the South as to 
plunge America into a great civil war), but it is 
unique in that it contributes to a greater variety of 
human needs than any other plant that Providence 
has placed upon the earth. From pole to pole, in 
every zone and clime; from the cradle to the grave, 
in every stage of life; from prince to pauper, 
