COTTON 
55 
burst with joy. That is the supreme moment, and 
the beautifully blended voices of the negro cotton 
pickers of the South is a sound, once heard, never 
to be forgotten. One cannot find any adjective to 
express the wild untutored beauty of it. It is a 
chant of inexpressible rhythm, with a note of sad- 
ness and mingled hope and regret, and one cannot 
stop without burdening it with that indefinable 
ualification — and calling it weird . . . these 
ays and nights filled with song and laughter, and 
the nimble plying of fingers set to music that is per- 
haps a lone relic of a long-forgotten Congo." 
IN DIXIE COTTON IS REALLY KING 
All this the Southern man knows from his youth 
up ; it is his inheritance and a part of his life. For 
whatever it may or may not be to the rest of the 
world, in "Dixie" cotton is really king. Here 
cotton is the life blood of commerce, its condition, 
the thermometer of trade. Every man talks cotton ; 
every man has an opinion as to the size of the crops; 
the weather conditions in Texas and throughout 
the Cotton Belt are subjects of general interest; 
the Government crop report is read with more in- 
terest than anything else a newspaper prints. 
When cotton prices drop, every Southern man 
feels the blow; when cotton prices advance, every 
industry throbs with new vigor. 
We can see then what it means to the South when 
we say that for the last five crops for which the fig- 
ures may be given, she has received nearly $1,000,- 
000,000 more than for the preceding five crops — 
twice as much money as is invested in all our Ameri- 
can cotton mills. For the crop of 1904 and 1905 
she received $341,000,000 more than for the crop 
