Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/257

Rh importance, I will only say, in the absence of positive proof, that it is not improbable. Certainly, far more of the hands that actually hold the plow are white than is popularly supposed. These laborers generally work for themselves or their parents; and as they do not ostensibly enter the labor market, their numerical importance goes unnoticed.

Secondly, there is the negro farm hand, who contributes the great bulk of the hired labor and is a sort of pace-maker to the white laborer.

I shall speak later of the better qualities of the negro; but at this point I must call attention to the widespread prevalence of certain evils which constitute a serious problem in southern agriculture. The generation of the race not yet sobered by middle age, who have never known, on the one hand, the fine discipline of the ante-bellum masters, nor have yet, on the other hand, learned self-discipline in the more trying conditions of freedom, have degenerated to a level lower than any occupied by their race since its African barbarity, and lower, let us hope, than it will ever occupy again. Not only the morals, but—what bears more directly on the present inquiry—the efficiency and reliability of the mass of the negro laborers below the age of forty are injured to a considerable degree by the group of vices represented by the pocket pistol, liquor, a deck of cards and a mistress. A certain dash of wildness marks youth under all colors; but such general statements are by no means adequate to cover the case of the postbellum southern negro.

Not only are the higher qualities of the laborer depending on character thus destroyed, but this moral degradation has necessarily incurred physical degeneration by initiating the negro into a catalogue of diseases to which his race was forty years ago a stranger. Some investigators assert that something like 70 per cent, of the race are infected with a dangerous type of disease incident to vice. And yet he works; for his constitution offers a strange resistance to a form of poison that completely invalids the white man, but frequently injures the negro no further than seriously to impair with lassitude and weakness that splendid body his inheritance by nature.

Not only is the negro, like all ignorant labor, inefficient, expensive and unprogressive, but he is suited to only a few staple crops, to the culture of which he has been reared. The negro is an inveterate 'cottontot' and conspires with the lien system to keep southern agriculture to that staple. His preference for cotton is shown by the fact that 71.9 per cent, of the negro farmers of the south are cotton farmers, as against 28.5 per cent, of the white farmers.