The Manning times. [volume] (Manning, Clarendon County, S.C.) 1884-current, 1918-02-27

oolIlC VI IIlc Suggestions put out Dy
New York so-called experts as max
ly absurd. They might have been
justified as a maximum price on cot
ton before the war, for cotton never
has sold at anything like it's intrin-
sic value, nor have cotton growers
and cotton laborers ever secured, at
least in the last 80 or 40 years, one
half as much for cotton as a better
economic system for this section
would have amply justified and de-
manded. Cotton growers and cotton
laborers, having a monopoly of the
most important single crop in the
world, have been held down to bare
existence, often selling their cotton
at less than the actual cost of produc-
tlon, even counting, as the small farm
ers and tenants have had to do, the
labor of their wives and children as
nothing on the balance sheet.
The whole policy of the cotton
buying interests of the world has
een neen to crush out the prosperity of
the cotton grower, perchancc not in
tentionally, but actually SO by rea-
son of the conditions which prevail
cd after the war and which estab-
iished precedents in the trade that
the poverty of the cotton-growing
interests. '7
While western farmers have
grown rich on grain production
southern farmers, whose staplce
crop is just as important to the
world as grain, have, by reason of
the economic conditions over which
they have no control, been kept to a
large extent in poverty. The high
est prices of the last two years have
6een bringing few rays of sunlight
INTO the homes of cotton growers and
even OF cotton farm laborcrs, but
much yet remains to be done before
there can be the same general pros
perlty among the cotton growers of
the south as exists among the grain
growers of Kansas and Nebraska and
other western states.
The fault has been with the sys-
tenn rather than with the growers or
with the soil of the south.
1t should be the aim of ali bus;noss
interests in the south to encourage
cotton growers to raise abundant
foodstuffs. Never again should this
section have to depend upon the west
Tor corn and meat. Indeed, it looks
as though all of the increased corn
production of the United States must
come from the south, since the west
has apparently, for the time being at
least, very nearly reached it's limit in
corn production. "
But while increasing to the utmost
extent the production of foodstuffs in
the south for the needs of this sec
ton and for shipment elsewhere,
there must be adequate production of
cotton. Cotton is not only essential for
Its limit and for use in the manufac-
ture of explosives, but is essential for
the enormous food value in cotton
seed oil and the feed value in cotton
seed cake and hulls. In raising cotton
the south is thus directly raising an
Invaluable foodstuff and fecdstuff.
The motives of any man who seeks
to decry the cotton growing interests
or to put on cotton maximum price
which would not yield large profit
TO the grower-not simply a fair pro .
fit:-may be seriously questioned, for
evidently he is seeking the advant-
OF other interests rather than the
advantage of the cotton grower, who
must have primary consideration.
Moreover, the cost of cotton grow
ing has so greatly increased that even
the suggestion which has been made
OF IL cents pound as a maximum
price IS absurd to any intelligent man,
York ENQUIRER