When all has been said, however, the typical Southern industry is cotton, upon the raising of which certainly nearly half of the population is concentrated, and it constitutes about a fourth of the whole annual product of the South. The field of the cotton industry extends from the foot of the mountains to the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts; and the Southern social problem is to a very large degree the problem of cotton raising under a system by which one race includes practically all the masters, and the other furnishes almost all the laborers for hire. The history of cotton is in itself romantic. In 1790, about 4,000 bales were raised; in 1800, 150,000; in 1820, 600,000; in 1840, over 2,000,000. In 1860 there was a tremendous crop of nearly 5,000,000 bales, a figure not reached again until 1879. In 1904 the crop was 13,700,000 bales--an amount not equaled since. The price of cotton has of late ruled much lower than in the first half of the century, when it sometimes ran up as high as 30 cents a pound. The 1860 crop brought about 11 cents. In 1898 the average price was about 6 cents, and some cotton sold as low as 3 cents, but the enormous crop of 1904 brought about 12 cents, and it has ruled higher since. In 1908 the slackening of the world's demand caused the price to drop, but it has risen again to the highest point for thirty years. The significance of the cotton crop is to be calculated not by the Liverpool market, but by its remarkable effect on the life of the South. One reason for its importance is that it can be grown on a great variety of land. Most of the best American long staple, the Sea Island, comes from a limited area off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in which a seed trust has been formed by the local planters to prevent anybody outside their narrow limits from raising that grade; for if the seed is renewed every few years, the fiber can be profitably raised on land now covered by the piney woods. Another variety of the long staple, the Floradora, is raised inland. The river bottoms and deltas of the numerous streams flowing into the Gulf of Mexico are a rich field for cotton, especially along the Mississippi river; but the Black Belt of the interior of Georgia and Alabama is almost equally productive; and the piney woods district and considerable parts of the uplands may be brought under cotton cultivation.