THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1910. THE GREAT COTTON FROST.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10037, 6 May 1910, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, MAY 6, 1910. THE GREAT COTTON FROST.

The great froats and snowstorms which occurred recently have given the | American cotton-belt "the most disastrous set-back it has had since the Civil War" Instance of that of ruthless freakißhness ofNature which manifests itself in flouting human calculation. The great floods in Prance recently and this devastating frost are alike in that respect, the one as far from peculiar to its theatre as the other., For the great frost records of hundreds of yearp indicate that these biting visitations have been mostly known in Europe. The Baltic has been frozen over more than once, and time and time again the Thames has been covered with ice on which coaches plied, fairs were held and bullocks roasted; but the only American frost reported in this catalogue is that i i Canada six years ago, when the tbermomeler showed

40 degrees below zero in the country around Montreal. That is exceptional frost, of unusual severity and long-sustained, as this one in the cotton belt appears to have been. The effect of such phenomena gives ar-

resting proof of the far-flung interdependence of human interests. If in America people go back to the Civil War for a parallel in cotton disaster, so they will in England, recalling the misery that stalked in Lancashire during the deprivation of raw material in that terrible time, when it was estimated that between them employers and workers were losing nearly £40,000,000 a year. One peoj pie lives by growing and selling a 1 commodity, another by using it as I the raw material of manufacturethat is what it means. National mutuality of interest reaches still

farther however, for a shortage of cotton means that the unfortunate Eastern peoples who use that textile so largely for wear must go worse - clad than ever owing to the scarcity and high price of the material. Possibly this will stimulate the efforts that have been made to increase British supplies of the raw material by growing more in India and Egypt and other parts of Africa; and in

any case that would have been necessary owing to the Americami using more of their own product and their cotton yield showing a steady falling off per acre, as though the land had been worked out. But in the meantime the Lancashire operatives, practically cut off from supplies that gave them about 70 per cent, of their total consumption, must endure a bitter pinch. As against their hard condition, and that of the thousands of Americans immediately affected by the laying of Nature's withering touch upon the cotton fields, the triumph of Patten with his cottoncorner looks like some grim, bitter joke upon humanity.