COTTON 
7 
among all sorts and conditions of men, it is of 
course the chief material used for clothing, but 
every year more and more of its products are 
brought to our tables, and it is called upon to feed 
a steadily increasing number of our flocks and 
herds. 
You get up in the morning from a bed clothed 
in cotton; you step out on a cotton rug; you let in 
the light by raising a cotton window-shade; you 
wash with soap made partly from cottonseed oil 
products; you dry your face on a cotton towel; you 
array yourself chiefly in cotton clothing; the "silk" 
in which your wife dresses is probably mercerized 
cotton; at the breakfast table you do not get away 
from King Cotton; cottolene has probably taken 
the place of lard in the biscuit you eat; the beef and 
the mutton were probably fattened on cottonseed 
meal and hulls; your "imported olive oil" is more 
likely from a Texas cotton farm than from an Ital- 
ian villa; your "butter" is probably a product of 
Southern cottonseed; the coal that burns in the fire 
may have been mined by the light of a cotton-oil 
lamp; the sheep from which your woolen clothing 
came were probably fed on cottonseed; the tonic 
you take may contain an extract of cotton 
root-bark; the tobacco you smoke not unlikely 
grew under a cotton cover and is put up in a cotton 
bag; your morning daily may be printed on cot- 
ton waste paper — and even in that Oriental skir- 
mish it tells about the contending forces were 
clothed in khaki duck, slept under cotton tents, cot- 
ton was an essential in the high explosives which 
were used, and when at last war had done its worst, 
surgery itself called cotton into requisition to aid 
the injured and dying. 
