Often a cotton mill is the only industrial enterprise in the village, and the number of common laborers needed is limited.

Too many of the fathers who had come to the village intending themselves to work gradually sank into the parasite class and sat around the village store while their children worked.
During the early expansion of the industry, the wages paid were low compared with New England standards, but they were sufficient to draw the people from the farms and to hold them at the mills.

In considering the wages paid in Southern mills, this fact must never be forgotten.
There was always an abundance of land to which the mill people could return at will and wrest some sort of living from the soil.

For them to go back to the land was not a venture full of unknown hazards.

They had been born on the land and even yet are usually only one generation removed, and the land cries out for tenants and laborers.