Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/259

Rh and least of all for another man's 'cropper.' And, sad to say, thousands of white croppers are fully equal to the most benighted negroes in lack of education.

Tables III. and IV. exhibit the relative productiveness of the labor of the two races, and also very strikingly the superiority of the agriculture of owners to that of tenants.

I have selected from the four representative southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina, the eighty counties (except the two extremes of sea islands and mountains) having the largest and the smallest proportion of negro population. I then found the production per improved acre of the farms in each of these counties. Table IV. contains all those counties whose negro population is 75 per cent, of the whole and all whose production reached $11 per acre. A table of this kind is unduly favorable to the negro, for two reasons: First, those counties throughout the south containing the richest lands were flooded with black population during the slavery regime, and their agricultural population is to-day of the same composition; and secondly, the good farming counties having to-day from 20 to 40 per cent, of negro population generally contained almost no negroes before the war, whereas their towns grown up since have drawn a large number of negroes from a distance, while the country districts are still inhabited in about the same proportion as formerly by whites. Thus a county having 30 per cent, negro population and a large per capita production might appear to one unacquainted with actual conditions to be blessed with just about sufficient negro