“More labour!” Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the chief complications of the Negro [Pg 79]problem—and I am not forgetting race prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice. [Pg 79] A Tenant Stealer In one town I visited—not Hawkinsville—I was standing talking with some gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy. “Do you see that man?” they asked me. I nodded. “Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country.” I heard a good deal about these “tenant stealers.” A whole neighbourhood will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away his neighbours’ Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an ignorant tenantry. I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other states have met this competitive disadvantage in the usual way in which such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says: Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour. Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia, said: [Pg 80]“Land and other forms of capital
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