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san bias, they were content to let truth take care of her children, and they despised the demand that books should be written in such a way that ordinary people could read them. How did Froude square with this movement?

He could not free himself from bias, although his was not the partiality of the older school. He was in fact a champion of that newer form of truth which grew out of the new philosophy. He was thoroughly secular in his sympathies, loving England more than the church, and stressing human character more than religion. With the new love of truth he was, also, in great sympathy, but it was not a cold and unimpassioned truth that he worshipped. He was no evolutionist. He concerned himself little with the development of social life, and dealt not with the rules of political economy. It was the great phases of history that attracted him; and he saw in them lessons which the men of his time needed. As to the doctrine of style, he was in no sense in sympathy with the new school: he ever held that history was another form of the drama; and that men and women should be brought on the stage, made to take their parts with the most realistic effect, and disposed of without a jar to the sensibilities of the audience. His was an artistic soul, artistic in its concepts of harmonious relations and vivid in portraying events as they occurred.

His greatest service to the world was in his exemplification of the powers of the true narrative style in history. At a time when mere powers of narration were slightly valued he gave to the reading public, and to those who seek to become skilled in writing historical narrative, a splendid example of how events may be told so as to command the attention and move the will of the reader. It is worth something subjective to be an artist, and it is a valuable asset of society to have an artist serving it. Froude's exceptional qualities lay in his artistic powers. That he might have the opportunity to develop them it was worth the world's while to overlook much inaccuracy of detail and much one-sidedness of judgment; for it is not facts that kindle the soul, but truth; and truth he ever sought to reach.

Enormous Wastes in Our Cotton Farming*

BY CLARENCE H. POE,

Editor of The Progressive Farmer, Raleigh, N. C.

A few weeks ago the writer obtained from Chief Statistician O. P. Austin, of the United States Department of Agriculture, a signed statement showing that for the year ending June 30, 1905, the value of our cotton and cottonseed exports was $410,657,652 as against $410,205,653 for "all other agricultural exports." Translated from the language of statistics into that of actual throbbing life, this means that you may take all other animal and vegetable products exported any year-wheat, corn, barley, oats, rye, flour, meal, oat-meal, fruits, vegetables, liquors, tobacco, wine, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, beef, pork, mutton, butter, cheese, canned goods, lard, oils, wool, hides and skins, etc., etc., the entire contribution, except cotton, furnished the outside world by every American farm, ranch, dairy, fruit farm, stock farm and garden, from Maine to California, from Michigan to Texas, from Alaska to Hawaii, including the South's own not unimportant share, -take all this, and with the proceeds of one year's cotton and cottonseed exports, the Southern cotton grower could buy the whole colossal aggregation, and still have a comfortable surplus for pin money.

But much as cotton now means to the South, it is to mean a great deal more. Men who read this article will live to see the South make 30,000,000 bales-and make the crop at a great saving as compared with our present wasteful practice.

It is not true, as a distinguished authority has charged, that our general methods of growing and handling cotton are "as bad as can be;" but it is true that they are susceptible of vast

*This article will appear as one of the chapters of a forthcoming book, "Cotton: Its Cultivation, Marketing, Manufacture, and the Problems of the Cotton World," written by Mr. Poe in collaboration with Dr. Charles W. Burkett, of the North Carolina A. & M. College. The book was written at the request of Doubleday, Page & Co., of New York, and it is announced as one of their spring publications.

improvement, and that enormous leaks in cotton profits are yet to be stopped.

One of the greatest leaks that any industry has ever known was the utter waste of cottonseed for a hundred years. Cottonseed used to be regarded as of so little use, in fact so much in the way, that cotton gins within the last two generations have been built over streams in order that the seed might be easily washed away! In some states laws have actually been passed requiring ginners, for the public health, to remove the rotting piles of waste seed!

Now the raw cottonseed are worth nearly $100,000,000, or about one-fifth the value of the cotton crop, and so rapidly are we finding new uses for them—all of which will be considered at greater length in other chapters in this book-that Mr. Edward Atkinson was probably not far wrong when he declared that it would be worth while for the South to grow great crops of cotton even if the plant made nothing but seed, no lint at all. How varied are the uses of cottonseed-meal, oil, hulls, and linters-has been suggested in the introduction to this volume.

The great trouble is that in the new awakening to the enormous value of cottonseed as a fertilizer, we have not yet come to a proper appreciation of their value as a feed also for in fact we may feed them and still get three-fourths of their fertilizing value in the manure from the animals. How unusually nutritious they are as a food may be guessed from the fact that for feeding purposes 100 pounds of cottonseed equals in value 116 pounds of corn, and a hundred pounds cottonseed meal equals 175 pounds of corn. Cottonseed at 25 cents a bushel or cottonseed meal at $25 a ton, is as cheap as corn at 40 cents a bushel.

The folly, therefore, of burying this most valuable of cattle feeds-burying it unused to rot in the soil-must be apparent to all. What should we think of using wheat bran or corn meal as a fertilizer for cotton without first having our live stock extract its feeding value? Yet in the one State in which the authors live, about $3,000,000 worth of cottonseed meal is used as a fertilizer-which means that $2,500,000 in

feeding values goes to nothing, and is a dead loss to our agricultural interests.

Moreover, we are learning more and more each year of the feeding values of cottonseed meal-learning how to combine it with other feeds, and feed in larger proportions to different classes of stock. In fact, its use as a human food has been seriously contemplated, a thoughtful journal recently declaring that "if cotton grew in Michigan, Battle Creek would be marketing an hundred thousand tons of the cottonseed meal mixed with wheat flour and put in pound packages. It would be advertised, and, with truth, as the only complete ration for the human race. A pound of cottonseed meal contains all the elements necessary for wholesome, nutritious bread; it contains three times as much digestible protein as the highest grade of wheat flour or the best oatmeal; it contains twice as much oil as oatmeal and ten times as much oil as wheat flour."

Whether or not we shall ever have cottonseed meal breakfast food, the fact remains that in using it as a fertilizer we are wasting millions in animal feeding values every yearand this is one great leak in cotton profits we shall eventually learn to stop.

Next to our waste of cottonseed the greatest leak in cotton farming has been the shameless lack of attention to seed selection. For every other crop the farmer has chosen his seed for planting with the greatest care-his corn from the most productive stalks and the best ears from these stalks; and with wheat, cane, tobacco, and even with his garden seed he has not been unmindful of the influence of heredity and the possibilities of breeding. But with our cotton crop it has been different. As a rule seed for planting have been taken at random from the gin-a conglomerate mixture of the product of good, bad and indifferent plants. But now farmers are beginning to pick seed from the best stalks and have this selected seed ginned separately for planting purposes. From our knowledge of what actual tests have accomplished we feel perfectly safe in asserting that by proper selection of seed through a ten year period the average yield per acre could be increased at least twenty-five per cent. At present prices—

after deducting all increased expense (there would be none except for picking, hauling and ginning)—this would mean an increased profit for Southern farmers of at least $100,000, 000 each year.

We are also wasting millions of dollars for the purchase of nitrogenous fertilizers, when the cow pea might be made to keep our Southern soils abundantly supplied with this most costly of all fertilizing ingredients. Making a rough guess, we should say that the farmers in the Carolinas and Georgia spend at least $8,000,000 a year for commercial nitrogen, when a proper system of rotation, including leguminous crops, would abundantly supply the soil with this ingredient.

There has been no noteworthy improvement in the cotton gin since the new born idea was first worked out by Eli Whitney; and our baling methods are also notoriously inefficient. "It is contended," says Mr. Thomas P. Grasty, "that the saw gin actually wastes or destroys over six per cent of all the cotton raised in the Southern States-meaning the destruction each year of nearly $40,000,000 worth of property belonging to the farmers of the South." By its rough handling it is also asserted by the highest authorities, that the saw gin destroys over forty per cent of the initial strength of the cotton fiber. No wonder one of our American cotton specialists is on record as declaring cotton to be "the most barbarously handled commercial product in the world." Besides the waste, the destruction of fiber, and the lack of uniformity in size of bales, gins at present are able to pack cotton at the average density of only fourteen pounds per cubic foot. Every bale not sold to local mills, therefore, must be sent to some cotton compress and the size reduced two-thirds before it can be exported.

A fortune awaits the man who will invent a compress requiring small horse power, so that the bales with one handling at the gin may be compressed tightly enough for export purposes; just as a fortune awaits the man who will invent a roller gin for upland cotton, or any other economical plan by which the present wastes and the barbarous laceration of the fiber may be obviated.

With American inventive talent put to this task, we may

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