READ OUR BIG SPECIAL OFFER ON FACE 13,
one
CARom
^VnioD
Farmer
Vol. VI.—No. 29.
RALEIGH. N. C.. JULY 25, 1912
The Solution of the South’s Cotton Problem.
(Extract from the last Undelivered Speech of Charles B. Aycock.)
HAVE read during the past fall and winter the ap
peals of Southern Governors, ihe Chambers of
Commerce, of agricullura societies and Fanrers,
Unions, of bankers and business men, urging farm
ers of the South to lessen the production of cotton;
and side by side with these appeals I have read in
the papers of the terrible suffering of men through
out the world for the want of adequate clothing I have known
ani all of us have known, despite our incrfeased production of
cott jn, that the world is not ytt adequately clad. Thousands
of r eople die annually for w int of ihe very raiment to be n ade
cut of cotton, the production tf which we a>e seel*ing to les
sen. I have realized that we must indeed lessen our produc
tion of cotton or impoverish ourselves in cul ivation under ex
isting conditions, and this has brought me to the knowledge
that these conditions are wrong, for God has given to each of
us the instinct to make tw’^o bales of cotton grow where one
grew before, and we are educating our farmer boys with this
aim in view, that they shall produce more and more each year
than their fathers produced before them. But how can they
work out this God-given instinct and how shall our teaching be
other than a failure if we shut our cotton within the borders of
the United States by building up a tariff wall against the pro
ducts of other countries ? Foreign trade is but an exchange of
products and is not, and cannot be, paid for in gold. The cot
ton crop alone would take for its purchase all the gold in the
world in a very few years. No, my countrymen, let us cease
this folly. Let us break down these high walls of protection
built around us for the sake of monopoly; let us turn in the for
eign goods of which our Republican brethren are so much
afraid. Then we will see a demand for high prices and for
more cotton than you can possibly produce, and the God-plant
ed instinct of every man to create more and more will find its
full play, and our agricultural education w ill cease to be a hum
bug and a farce. Why shall we teach how to grow more and
then combine to prevent the growth of*more? I admit our
present need along this line. I admit the absolute wisdom at
this moment of lessening the cotton production, but I deny the
sense, the morality, of continuing the conditions which have
forced this necessity upon us.
One Dollar a Year.