Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/256

252 jammed up jealously against the railroad track. In the yard a woman of comely but unclean person washed clothes. The slouchy individual in blue shirt and no suspenders was her husband. Most likely neither of them could distinguish the English language in its printed form from the inscription on an Aztec monument. These tenants might have bought a good farm for less than the clerk in the city would pay for his cottage home; for the average value of farms in the south is only $11.79 an acre, as against $36.25 for lands in the northwest frequently not so productive.

The dwellings and wages of southern farm laborers have both improved, the former in the greater degree. No progressive southern planter would to-day build such quarters as were erected twenty years ago. Experience indicates that good quarters attract a better type of laborer and hold him more steadily, and so prove a good investment. In some parts of Louisiana dwellings furnished to a family free of charge (as is throughout the south the universal rule) cost $400. Comfort is subserved in better floors, glass windows and secure ceiling; and decency, in a larger number of rooms.

The condition of the agricultural laborer seems to have improved most in the distinctly staple states, such as Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina, rather than in those whose agricultural interests are scattering, such as Maryland and Kentucky.

Wages to the laborer are less in the south than in any other section; but there is ground for believing that the cost of labor is greater to the southern farmer than to the northern, western or northwestern; that is to say, a hundred dollars expended for labor in the south brings less return than in any other region of the country. The low efficiency of farm labor is one of the heaviest impediments to the progress of southern agriculture.

One of the results of this inferior help is that the southern farmer enjoys but a small part of the benefits of agricultural inventions; first, because to hire the low priced labor is as cheap in the short run as to buy the machinery, and thus the pace is set at antiquated methods and non-participation in agricultural progress in the long run; and secondly, because such ignorant labor can neither utilize nor take care of expensive machinery.

To understand the inferior quality of southern farm labor necessitates a brief examination of the personnel of the labor force. First, there are the white laborers, comprising something more or less than half the entire number of the actual tillers of the soil. It has been estimated by respectable authorities that the major portion of the cotton is raised by white labor; but concerning a statement of such