The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-07-10

H. K. Webster, in the American Maga-
 zine.
 Is the cotton speculator a mere bird
 of prey, or has he a place in the a economy of commerce and is he, in the broadest sense, producer? There is, of course, no sore of trade or indus try but has some element of chance about it. The merchant who buys goods with the idea of selling them at a profit. may see the demand for them disappear while they lie on his shelves; or the wholesale prices of them may go down. so that his competitors, who bought later than he can undersell him. The manu- facturer must always speculate when he buys a great deai, if he thinks it will lower next week he buys as little as he can get on with.
 You cannot go into any line of com mercial or industrial activity without be- coming a speculator, and whether you succeed or fail will partly, at least, de- pend on whether your guess on the fu- ture was right or not, whether or not you rightly foresay at the beginning of the transaction, the conditions which would prevail at the end of it.
 The element of chance Is there, always, and the only question, then, is, who shall take 1t? If 1t Is small, 1t will probably be absorbed by the mercnant or the man. ufacturer himself. But if in the nature of the case 1t Is large, so large that it Is altogether the big end of the opera ton, then he will look for some one to share 1t with him. That person will be the professional speculator. He has the best information that can be got, and he has learned the trick of striking a bal ance from 1t, so he is willing to back his opinion and to carry the risk.
 Now the yearly value or the crop which the cotton spinners of the world must consume is about five hundred million dollars. A fall of one cent pound in the price of cotton after the spinner had bought his years supply would wipe out his entire profit for years work. Ob viously the chance is the big end In this operation, and is much too big for the spinner himself to assume; he needs somebody to stand between him and the planter, to carry that colossal load of cot ton safely across the year, as steadily as may be without letting 1t drop on any body.
 Theoretically, then, the speculator has his place, is a real producer and not bird of prey. Ideally. mind you, "a spec ulative community of highly trained in- telllgence would constitute an insurance company" But do these ideal conditions prevail? Is tho machinery of specula- tlon as good as 1t should be? Is the speculator altogether guiltless of the widespread ruin in the south?
 It is not wonderful that with all the immense quantity of cotton that the south was raising and selling, the hundreds of millions of dollars that each years crop brought into the country-it is not won derful that the merchant still had the producer of all this wealth in his debt; that the mortgage on next years crop had to be renewed each planting time.
 The credit merchant has seen his best days He Is not obsolete yet, but his root, and that of his brother, the warehouse man, who did the same thing in a little different way, has really begun to wither. Banks are springing up all over the south, and the day when credit shall become commodity instead of weapon of high wayman, is visible to the eye of hope.
 But now that the merchant Is reluct- antly accepting cash instead of cotton mortgages for his goods he has only to look across the street at the wide-open door of the rural cotton exchange" to see his successor, the new agency, that will infallibly rob the south of the fruits of its labor, just as he did that VIII do far more than he ever did to demor- alze its society Cotton Is still king but he has got a new viceroy.
 They talked a good deal at the great convention of the fact that the south has a monopiy in the production of the world cotton: but this Is the more important fact. that cotton has a monopoly of the south of all the south, all US hfe' all it's activities. It was said Tn one of the speeches that cotton has enslaved those whom 1t has not enriched. But cotton has enslaved those 1t has enriched as well as those it has impoverished; it has enslayed the whole south, ever since its history began with the Whitney gin. It has been the great slaveholder. the only one, if you will go to the last analysis. We must go past that pair of extor- tioners the credit merchant and the warehouseman. past the professional speculator, with all his imperfections on his head. past the bogey of overpro- duction. which the Southern Cotton asso- | citation Is fighting so lustily, to account | for the paradox.
 Tt is curious state of affairs. l starve