rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel building really worthy architecturally.

Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation—a drive of some eight miles. In common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer, or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country. From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement. White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear was not absent even among these people.

I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi, which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:

I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it’s because we never take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o’clock at night—because I am afraid.

As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees many plantation houses, even those built in recent[Pg 70] years, standing vacant and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.

[Pg 70]

Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course, remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too, grow discontented and get away at the first 

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