This extract from the _Manufacturers' Record_ is a somewhat grandiloquent statement of the conviction of the South that it possesses a magnificent cotton monopoly which no other part of the world can ever rival; that with proper foresight and with courage, the South may corner the world's market in the staple, and fix a price which will insure prosperity. In a country full of natural resources of many kinds, with a soil on which corn may be grown almost as good as in Indiana, where cattle can be raised and dairies may be established, the chief aim and object of life is to "make cotton." The talk of small farmers is cotton; every country merchant of any standing is a cotton buyer; and most of the large wholesale houses and banks are interested in cotton. In all the large cities and some of the small ones are cotton exchanges at which are posted on immense blackboards the day's data for "Receipts at Ports," "Overland to Mills and Canada," "Current Stock," "Southern Mill Takings," "Total in Sight to Date," "World's Possible Supply," and so on. The federal Census Bureau publishes from time to time estimates of the acreage and condition of cotton, which so affect the markets that great efforts have sometimes been made to bribe the officials to reveal the figures before they are published. The Census Office issues periodical reports showing the number of bales of cotton ginned throughout the South. This is the more remarkable because cotton is not the principal product of the South, nor even the major crop of the rural sections; but the size and public handling of the crop carry away men's imagination. Timber, turpentine, mining, and iron making, taken together, produce a larger annual value than cotton. The total value of all other crops in 1907 was $758,000,000, which was about $90,000,000 more than the value of the cotton crop. The corn alone was over $485,000,000, or over two thirds the value of the cotton. Hay ($92,000,000), wheat, tobacco, oats, and potatoes make up $272,000,000 more. Though the Lower South grew only 9,000,000 bushels of wheat, rice, cultivated on rather a small scale in South Carolina, is a crop of growing importance in Louisiana and Texas. The South raises no sugar beets, little flaxseed, and not a twentieth of the wool; but the sugar and molasses are worth nearly $20,000,000. Trucking or the raising of vegetables, chiefly for the Northern market, is said to employ 700,000 freight cars in the season. The South has also about 15,000,000 cattle, 6,000,000 sheep, and 15,000,000 pigs, all of which are independent of cotton except that to some degree cotton seed is the food for stock.