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plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken, and then it was clearly to the master's interest to have both of them take new mates. This wide-spread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years. Probably seventy-five per cent. of the marriages now are performed by the pastors. Nevertheless, the evil is still deep seated and only a general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it.

The ignorance of the ex-slaves is far deeper than crude estimates indicate. It is ignorance of the world and its meaning, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibility-indeed, of all those things as to which it was for the interest of the slave system to keep the laboring class in profound darkness. Those very things then which a white boy absorbs from his earliest social atmospherestarts with, so to speak, are the puzzling problems of the black boy's maturer years. And

this, too, not by reason of dullness but for lack of opportunity.

It is hard for an individual mind to grasp and comprehend the real social condition of a mass of human beings without losing itself in details and forgetting that after all each unit studied is a throbbing soul. Ignorant it may be, and poverty-stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life

all this, even as you and I. These black thousands are not lazy; they are improvident and careless, they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great townworld on Saturday, they have their loafers and ne'er-do-weels, but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully for a return and under circumstances that would call forth equal voluntary effort from few, if any, other modern laboring class. Over 88 per cent. of them, men, women and children, are farmers.

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LOG CABIN HOME

The rest are laborers on railroads, in the turpentine forests and elsewhere, teamsters and porters, artisans and servants. There are ten merchants, four teachers, and twenty-one who preach and farm.

Most of the children get their schooling after the "crops are laid by" and very few there are that stay in school after the spring work has commenced. Child-labor is found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering

ignorance and stunting physical development.

Among this people there is no leisure class; ninety-six per cent of them are toiling-no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past, little of careless, happy childhood and dreaming youth. The dull monotony of daily life is broken only by the Saturday trips to town.

The land is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine and ten months in succession the crops will come if asked; garden vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and

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WOMEN "SOWING" GUANO.

July, hay in August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas. And yet over two-thirds of the land there is but one crop and that leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this?

The merchant of the Black Belt is a curious institution part banker, part landlord, part contractor, and part despot. His store which used most frequently to stand at the crossroads and become the centre of a weekly village, has now moved to town and thither the Negro tenant follows him. The merchant keeps everything-clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, pork and meal, canned and dried

goods, wagons and plows, seed and fertilizer -and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for at the store across the way. Here, then, comes the tenant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent landlord's agent for hiring forty acres of land; he fingers his hat nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Sanders, when he calls out "Well, Sam, what do you want?" Sam wants him to "furnish" him-i.e., to advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject he and the merchant go to a lawyer and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon in return for seed and a week's rations. As soon as the green cotton leaves appear above the ground another mortgage is given on the "crop." Every Saturday or at longer intervals Sam calls upon the merchant for his "rations;" a family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat sidepork and a couple of bushels of corn-meal a month. Beside this, clothing and shoes must be furnished; if Sam or his family is sick there are orders on the druggist and doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to buy more sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall the shrewd merchants sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men.

The security offered for such transactions -a crop and chattel mortgage-may at first seem slight. And indeed, the merchants tell many a true tale of shiftlessness and cheating; of cotton picked at night, mules disappearing and tenants absconding. But on the whole the merchant of the Black Belt is the most prosperous man in the section. So skilfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant that the black man has often simply to choose between pauperism and crime; he "waives" all homestead exemptions in his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the laws put almost in the full control of the landowner and of the merchant. When the crop is growing the merchant watches it like a hawk; as soon as it is ready for market he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies and if, as sometimes happens, there is anything left he hands it

over to the black serf for his Christmas celebration.

The direct result of this system is an allcotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of the Black Belt is cotton. the Black Belt is cotton. It is a crop always salable for ready money, not usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the Negroes know how to raise. The landlord therefore demands his rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop. There is no use asking the black tenant then to diversify his crops-he cannot under this system. Moreover, the system is bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon on the River road. A young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him stolid, silent.

"Hello!" cried my driver-he has a most impudent way of addressing these people, though they seem used to it—" what have you got there?"

"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon, a great thin side of fat pork covered with salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.

"What did you pay for that meat?"

"Ten cents a pound." It could have been bought for six or seven cents cash. "And the meal?"

"Two dollars." One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town. So here was a man paying $5 for goods which he could have bought for $3 cash, and raised for $1 or $1.50.

Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started behind-started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

The other underlying causes of this situation. are complicated but discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work. Behind this honest and widespread opinion, dishonesty and cheating of the igno

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