oarser fabrics, uses about
5,000,000 bales of cotton annually, as compared with Great Britain's
4,000,000. The British product, however, sells for much more. Thus the
value of the spindle standard is affirmed. England, then, produces well
in excess of one-third of the cotton cloth of the world; the United
States considerably more than one-fifth of it, with the other countries
trailing far behind, but prospering nevertheless.

The Individuality
of the Cotton Fiber

[Illustration: _The cotton fiber--a highly magnified view, showing the
twist_]

It is a curious ruling of fate which makes the spinning of cotton fiber
possible. There are many other short vegetable fibers, but cotton is the
only one which can profitably be spun into thread. Hemp and flax, its
chief vegetable competitors, are both long fibered. The individuality of
the cotton fiber lies in its shape. Viewed through the microscope, the
fiber is seen to be, not a hollow cylinder, but rather a flattened
cylinder, shaped in cross-section something like the figure eight. But
the chief and valuable characteristic is that the flattened cylinder is
not straight, but twisted. It is this twist which gives its peculiar and
overwhelming importance to cotton, for without this apparently fortuitous
characteristic, the spinning of cotton, if possible at all, would result
in a much weaker and less durable thread. The twist makes the threads
"kink" together when they are spun, and it is this kink which makes for
strength and durability.

Though the cotton plant seems to be native to South America, Southern
Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, its cultivation, was largely confined
at first to India, and later to India and the British West Indies. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, the West Indies, because of their
especial fitness for growing the longer staples were supplying about
seventy per cent. of the food of the Lancashire spindles. The United
States having made unsuccessful attempts to produce cotton in the early
days of the colonies, first became an important producing country toward
the end of the eighteenth century. American Upland cotton, by reason of
its comparatively short staple, and the unevenness of the fibers, as well
as the difficulty of detaching it from the seed, was decidedly inferior
to some other accessible species. The Southern planters who grew it,
moreover, found it next to impossible to gin it properly, the primitive
roller gin of the ti