The world’s markets offer a most magnificent opportunity for the enterprise of American cotton manufacturers. We grow four-sixths of the world’s crop of cotton but manufacture only one-sixth. That is to say, we export three-fourths of the cotton we grow, leaving England and Germany to turn the fibre into yarns and fabrics for other countries in all parts of the world. A much larger share of this foreign trade ought by right to come to the United States, for the foreign market offers a field vastly larger and quite as profitable as the domestic field, if the extraordinary profits of Lancashire spinners during the past few years are to be taken as an index.
Last year Great Britain exported cotton goods valued at $500,000,000, while our exports of cotton manufactures were valued at only $26,000,000. During this same period Great Britain exported 6,298,000,000 yards of piece goods valued at $400,000,000; our exports meanwhile being only 216,000,000 yards at $15,000,000. Here, then, is a field for our best ambitions and skill. We cannot forever endure the sight of seeing other nations manipulating our raw product at enormous profits, a goodly portion of which should remain for distribution on this side of the Atlantic.
There is one respect in which the New England cotton industry much impresses an outsider. Your industry, I am glad to say, is, and always has been, remarkably free from the evils of promotion and speculative enterprise. Furthermore, it has most fortunately not been inoculated with the fever for trusts and consolidations; although I happen to know that such projects have from time to time been presented to your consideration. Perhaps your refusals to entertain such propositions thus far have been due to conditions peculiar to the industry; yet I venture to hope that it has been not a little due to the strong spirit of individualism which is one of the best characteristics of the New Englander; a characteristic which I trust will be cherished for generations to come, because it is a most wholesome and necessary check upon the paternalistic tendencies of the day. One beneficial result of this policy is that the cotton industry is adapting itself to the new conditions following the panic with much less friction than in other industries. You have lowered prices, curtailed production and diminished costs in order to stimulate a revival of consumption in a manner that promises to make you among the first in completing the process of readjustment. When recovery begins the cotton trade ought to be among the first to feel reviving influences. While other industries have been using or misusing their newly acquired powers of combination to resist natural tendencies, or to squeeze out dividends upon grossly watered stocks, you have squarely faced the new conditions and trimmed your sails accordingly. I have no doubt, therefore, that, with your mills honestly capitalized, you will soon be going along safely and comfortably in smoother waters when the trusts will still be struggling against adverse conditions simply made worse by foolish resistance to economic laws.
The most encouraging feature of our business situation now is the prospect of an unusually large wheat crop, winter wheat being in extra fine condition, and spring wheat having been planted under the most favorable conditions, owing to the season for farm work being three weeks earlier this year than last. The planting of other crops has also been facilitated by good weather, and altogether the agricultural outlook, at this date, has very rarely been so promising of bountiful results.
This is a great national blessing, for the foundation of our national wealth is our crops. Agriculture is indeed the great source of both our national and international strength. It was almost entirely from this source that we were enabled, from a merely nominal sum last August, to build up a foreign trade balance of 521 millions of dollars in the first eight months of this fiscal year, and the large preponderance of our exports over our imports still continues, and will make the balance in our favor at the end of the year one of unexampled magnitude.
This curtailment of our imports, especially of luxuries, has made the shoe pinch in Europe, for we had been Europe’s best foreign customers. But, naturally extravagant as we are as a people, we can economize with as much ease, celerity and determination as we can spend, when the necessity to do so arises. So we are at present economizing on a grand scale and with great success.
We have only to consider our unlimited sources of national wealth, however, to see that the prospect before us is one that should inspire absolute confidence in the gradual return of prosperity in all directions. Let us bear in mind that our agricultural products yielded us last year, as the returns of the Department of Agriculture show, $7,400,000,000.
Mining and manufacturing were the next largest sources of our national wealth. The metals mined yielded $3,000,000,000, and this metal product was converted by manufacturing into materials that had a market value of fifteen thousand millions of dollars. Thus the agricultural products, metals mined and metals manufactured, in the year, had a value of $25,400,000,000. We may, therefore, well and honestly say that this is a great country. “Long life to it!” as an enthusiastic Irishman was once heard to exclaim. “By jabers, it can’t be beat!”
The market for raw cotton has, of course, been handicapped by the depression in the cotton industry, and the efforts of the Southern planters to advance the price of the staple very materially by holding it back instead of marketing it, have failed, as they deserved to fail. Cotton is now lower than it was during the crisis, and about as low as at any time in this crop year, being 300 points, or 3 cents a pound, below the season’s top notch. But cotton is still king in the factories.
This decline is equivalent to $15 per bale, or a hundred and eighty million dollars on a crop of twelve million bales. So spinners and spot buyers in general have not for two years had so good a chance to purchase for summer and autumn delivery, and advantageously cover their season’s requirements as they had last month and this. But spinners have taken more than a million bales less of this season’s crop since the first of September last than in the same time in the previous year.