the South

Cotton-seed OI.

The cotton-seed oil industry has had a spectacular history. For many years cotton-seed, though known to have value as a fertilizer if spread on the land, was almost entirely wasted. The great heaps of seed which accumulated about the gins constituted a nuisance, having an offensive odour when rotting. Small quantities of oil were expressed from cotton-seed in the South early in the 19th century, but these operations were mostly experimental, and the industry did not begin on a com mercial basis until shortly before the Civil War. After the war the manufacture was revived, and was firmly rooted by 1880. In that year about 5% of the seed produced was crushed, whereas in 1926, 8o% was crushed, and it is estimated that the industry now produces wealth to the extent of $500,000,000. There has been more combination in the cotton-seed oil industry than in the textile industry, and it has a higher proportion of outside capital (of packers and soap manufacturers, for example), but deflation of the business since the over-expansion just before and during the World War has opened new opportunity for local enterprise. In 1914 there were 882 mills in operation, but since 1922 the number has been less than 600 (57o in 1926).

Though the number of mills has decreased since 1922, the volume of products has, with trifling exceptions, increased. In 1926, 6,305,775 tons of seed were crushed, producing gal. of oil and 2,840,084 tons of cake and meal; there were tons of hulls and 1,041,864 bales of linters. In 1925 the average number of wage-earners was 16,215, a large proportion negroes. Products in 1925 were worth $295,685,000, an increase of $69,297,000 over 1923. Texas has three times as many oil mills as any other State.

Furniture.

A new industry in the South is furniture manu facturing. The first plant was built at High Point, N.C., in 1888; by 1900 this State had six small factories with $125,000 capital and products worth $159,000. The Southern States had 312 furniture factories in 1921, 346 in 1923 and 371 in 1925. The leading States are North Carolina, with 13,567 wage-earners in 1925 and products valued at $51,208,238; Virginia, 4,376 wage earners and products valued at $18,792,297; Tennessee, 2,915 wage-earners and products valued at $9,532,520; Georgia, wage-earners and products valued at $7,969,154. The South eastern States and Virginia produced furniture in 1921 valued at $41,039,000, and in 1925 the product amounted to $89,339,000. All of the States shared in this remarkable increase, but North Carolina in 1925 had three times as many furniture factories (127) as Tennessee, its closest competitor in the South.

High Point is the parent and chief centre. In 1921 the Southern Furniture Exposition building was erected here. This has helped develop a Southern market in rivalry to those at Grand Rapids, Mich., and Jamestown, N.Y. The North Carolina Piedmont at

the inception of the industry had an ample supply of cheap labour, cheap hardwoods near at hand and excellent railway facilities. The furniture manufactured, most of it for Southern consump tion, was durable but of inexpensive grades. As the labour be came more skilled and the cost of raw material increased better grades of product were turned to. Good furniture, comparing favourably with that made in the North, now comprises the bulk of the North Carolina output. The increase in real wages since the World War, and the spread of instalment buying, have been powerful factors in the prosperity and improved character of the furniture industry in the South as elsewhere. Many Southern factories enjoy a national distribution of their product, and make goods for foreign shipment as well.

The Southern Appalachian hardwoods are being rapidly ex hausted—the last virgin growth has been entered. While Southern factories get their oak chiefly from North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and their yellow poplar (used for cores for veneers) from the swamps of the eastern Carolinas, hauls of 500 to Boo m. in the supply of lumber are not uncommon. In 1909 only 5% of the raw material used in North Carolina came from other States, while in 1919 the amount brought in was 31%. Black walnut and mahogany veneers, coming from the Middle West, are increasingly used. Raw materials are now hardly cheaper in the Southern Piedmont than elsewhere, though labour, which is the largest single item in the cost of furniture manufacture, is paid less than in the North. It is believed that within little more than a decade the lower Mississippi valley will be drawn upon heavily not only by the Southern furniture industry, but that of the whole country. Already methods of economizing on the use of hardwood are used in the South—veneers are more and more employed, and steel and glass are being introduced. Waste is being reduced and by products are being developed.

It took the South a very long time to recover from the Civil War and the reconstruction governments. Worse even than the obvious economic and social effects were the effects on education and on the state of public opinion; provincialism, sensitiveness to criticism from without or within, solidarity of thinking not only about politics but about all other major subjects, a tempera mental conservatism that resisted the tendencies of modern life and thought—all these qualities of mind that had become manifest even in the ante-bellum period were now accentuated. Slowly and surely a more liberal and national point of view, aided by industrial progress and the gradual development of an educa tional system, has made its way.