A short magazine piece describing how gold wire for gold lace is made. A silver rod is coated with gold leaf, burnished, and drawn through steel plates into very fine wire, with the gold keeping the same ratio to the silver throughout. The article estimates the gold layer on the finest wire at about one-third of one-millionth of an inch thick.

Second of two magazine articles by Henry Kitchell Webster on the economic plight of Southern cotton planters in the early 1900s. It covers the 1904 bumper crop and price collapse, the January 1905 New Orleans convention that founded the Southern Cotton Association, and the exposure of leaked government crop reports. It also examines cotton futures speculation, with Theodore Price's criticisms of the exchanges, and the credit-merchant system, concluding that planters stay dependent because they grow cotton instead of food. The article is illustrated with photographs of a cotton field, Richard Cheatham and Theodore H. Price.