get entirely away, else the planter will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or slaves. I say “a large proportion”—but there are thousands of industrious Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead—as I shall show in my next chapter.

In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable[Pg 78] number of the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in Alabama said to me:

[Pg 78]

“Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn’t have a low-down white tenant on my place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him; but there are some white men who won’t work and can’t be driven, because they are white.”

Race Troubles in the Country

In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human society—industrial and urban development—began seriously to disturb the feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea—human enough—that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are slower than men’s ways, but more certain.

The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering other occupations, migrating west or north—where more money is to be made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively, have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more serious crisis.

Cry of the South: “More Labour”

If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a single great shout:

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