A few days ago I saw in the Memphis Commercial-Appeal that you had severed your connection with Watson’s Magazine. I am a subscriber and have taken the Magazine solely on account of your Editorials, which I regard as the finest and most forceful I ever read in any Magazine. My subscription is about run out and if you are no longer connected with the publication I do not care to renew. This is my reason for making this inquiry, and I will be glad to hear the report is untrue. If it is correct let me know if it will be your purpose to edit a similar periodical. In that event you can count on me as a subscriber, even if the subscription price should be increased to $5.00 per annum.
I think you are doing a great and necessary work in your attempts to arouse the people to the dangers that now menace the liberties of this unhappy land, “to hastening ills a prey.”
There is one point on which I am constrained to criticise you and that is your ill-advised attacks on W. J. Bryan, which is something I am utterly unable to understand.
Why do you do this when you both stand for the same things? It seems to me unfortunate, to say the least, that soldiers of the hosts of Reform should turn their artillery upon each other when so much ammunition is needed to fight the cohorts of Plutocracy, and in this connection nothing will ever be accomplished in the way of bringing this Government again into the possession of the people if any such suicidal policy is pursued. The reformers must get together if this Republic is to be preserved, if it is not even now too late to save it. Of this I am certain: we have no time left us for internal dissensions, and I hope that so splendid a soldier of the common good as yourself, will, in the future, refrain from stirring up discord in the ranks of Reform, and reserve your ammunition entirely for our enemies.
As to Gins.
R. W. Barkley, New York City. November 12, 1906.
I note that you are proposed as President of the Cotton Association. I have read your Magazine from the first number until Mann got it, and I know your desire to benefit the South. I control the patent rights on a cotton gin which works on a new principle and which leaves the cotton in natural lengths, thereby enhancing the price to the planter by one to five cents per pound. The gin can be run by hand, or by power, and a few farmers can own one in common and thereby earn money by ginning their own cotton. The gin consists of “mechanism for gradually opening and loosening the cotton fibres while still attached to the seeds, with means for thereafter removing the seeds.” Just take a little cotton and gradually pull the fibres apart, without, however, separating them from the seed, until you have a large puff ball and then see how easily they come off at the seed. Well, that is what this machine does. No “gin cut” cotton in it. Seed practically unhurt, also. Am looking for money wherewith to build a large machine, (the inventor made the working model by hand himself); it does the work fairly well, but it is getting to be ram-shackle for demonstration purposes, and then for capital wherewith to work the gin commercially. Such a gin ought to interest you and also the Cotton Association.
Editor’s Note.—Having just been run through one new and improved gin—known as Town Topics—and having been badly “gin cut” myself, have but slight inclination for new inventions of the gin variety.