Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/641

 CHANGES IN CENSUS METHODS 627

Other cases in which the owner of a tract of land, sometimes still called a plantation, has divided it up into what may properly be called separate farms, which are leased out to tenants who furnish their own farm animals and implements and who work almost, if not entirely, in independence of any control by the owner of the land. In these cases it is proper enough to regard the tenant farm as the agricultural unit ; but in the case of the other type of plantations it is necessary to recognize the plantation as the unit, at least for certain purposes. To liken the negro "cropper" of the South on his bit of land to the independent farmer operating a rented farm in the North is entirely to obscure the true agri- cultural, economic, and social conditions. It attributes to negro farm laborers an independence which many of them have, un- fortunately, not as yet attained. Moreover, at the census of 1900 much duplication of land and of crops occurred by reason of the fact that one enumerator would return the entire plantation of a given owner while another enumerator would return the same land on the schedules for the several tenants, and it required much work in the office to eliminate these duplications.

It is probable that the difficulty will be attacked at the present census by preparing a special schedule to be filled by the planta- tion owner or his manager, while at the same time retaining separate schedules for the individual tenants. These two sets of schedules will be so adjusted to each other as to make it com- paratively easy to eliminate duplications. The attempt will be made also to distinguish as clearly as possible between those cases where the negro tenant is practically a farm laborer super- vised by the plantation-owner, and those cases where he is largely or wholly independent of such control and supervision. An approximately correct distinction of this character can appar- ently be made, even in the absence of other data, from the form of the rental contract itself. It appears that ordinarily, where the tenant pays half of the crop as his rental, he is practically a farm laborer under supervision; while usually those tenants are practically independent who pay as rent either a given amount of cash or of cotton, or a share less than one-half (one-fourth the