Page:The cotton kingdom (Volume 2).djvu/259



county, to distribute some corn bought by the Commissioner's Court, for the destitute of our county; and could you have witnessed the applicants, and heard their stories, for the last few days, I am satisfied you could draw a picture that would excite the sympathy of the most selfish heart. I am free to confess that I had no idea of the destitution that prevails in this county. Why, sir, what do you think of a widow and her children living, for three days and nights, on boiled weeds, called pepper grass?—yet such, I am credibly informed, has been the case in Chambers County."—From a letter to the editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Journal, from Hon. Samuel Pearson, Judge of Probate, for Chambers County, Alabama.

"—We have sad news from the north part of Georgia. The Dalton Times says that many people are without corn, or means to procure any. And, besides, there is none for sale. In some neighbourhoods, a bushel could not be obtained for love or money. Poor men are offering to work for a peck of corn a day. If they plead, 'Our children will starve,' they are answered, 'So will mine, if I part with the little I have.' Horses and mules are turned out into the woods, to wait for grass, or starve. The consequence is, that those who have land can only plant what they can with the hoe—they cannot plough. It is seriously argued that, unless assisted soon, many of the poor class of that section will perish.'—California Paper.

No approach to anything like such a state of things as those extracts portray (which extended over parts of three agricultural States) ever occurred, I am sure, in any rural district of the Free States. Even in our most thickly-peopled manufacturing districts, to which the staple articles of food are brought from far-distant regions, assistance from abroad, to sustain the poor, has never been asked; nor do I believe the poor have ever been reduced, for weeks together, to a diet of corn. But this famine at the South occurred in a region where most productive land can be purchased for from three to seven dollars an acre; where maize and wheat