race, and their disposition to seize upon improved implements and new methods, make the advantage over the colored man immense. This superiority adds a large per cent. to the increase on production. The negro labor is steadily leaving the farm; yet upon the whole, for the masses of this race, with a few exceptions, this work is best suited to them. They can make it profitable to themselves and to others, upon the condition that their labor is subject to direction in detail. Without such superintendence, the experience of years shows that their work is an egregious failure. A farm under their management means bedlam let loose. There are exceptions to this general statement; but, like all exceptions, they are numerable.

This fact, that the colored people are leaving the country for the towns, suggests another subject: "Can the white people raise the cotton demanded by the world?"

We find the following statement and table in the Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1876, p. 136:

(1) "Some writers have assumed, prior to the change of the labor system, one-sixth as the proportion of white laborers in the cotton fields. The proportion has been increasing for the last ten years, until now there are two States, according to the reports of our correspondents, in which the larger part of the product is grown by whites. Returns from more than half the cotton area of Texas make the proportion of cotton grown by white labor five-eighths, and data representing three-eighths of the Arkansas area establish the proportion of six-tenths. In every State there is a large increase of white labor production. While the percentage for each State might be nearer to perfect accuracy if the information covered every acre of the cotton area, the actual canvassing of about half the field, ranging

in each State from three-eighths to five-eighths of its area, furnishes the best attainable means of estimating the proportion of the cotton crop grown by whites. On this basis the proportions are, 60 per cent. by black labor, 40 per cent. by white. The proportions, by States, are as follows:

"The proportion of white cultivators will not decrease. As population increases, the white element will be stronger in numbers, and a larger proportion of the cotton will be grown by small proprietors; while the African element will drift into menial service in towns, and in manufacturing and mining enterprises, and many who aspire to occupancy of land will earn only a precarious existence."

This was in 1876, seventeen years ago.

(2) "King Cotton's days of prosperity, it was gravely predicted, would end forever with the emancipation of the slaves. But the South raises thirty per cent. more cotton to-day than it ever did before the war, and raises it on a smaller number of acres. And note the increase of white labor in the production of the cotton crop. Before the war, white labor produced only ten per cent. of this staple; in 1883, forty-four per cent.; in 1884, forty-eight per cent; in 1885, over fifty per cent. The white man of the New South has gone to work in the cotton fields as well as everywhere else."*

*The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine for March, 1887, p. 771.

If the gain in cotton production by white labor is two and one-half per cent. annually since 1883, then the cotton produced by white labor in 1893 is about seventy per cent. of the entire crop.

(3) "Mr. Edward Atkinson has shown that the crop produced in twenty-one years by free labor was 35,000,000 bales in excess of the crop produced in the preceding period of twenty-one years by slave labor. The claim has been often iterated in the South that this difference is due to the white labor that has entered the cotton fields since the war ended."

“This old nonsense about our climate and the inability of the white man to toil under a blazing Southern sun, is so transparent that it is scarcely necessary to show its falsity. White immigration has poured into Florida of late, passed over the negro districts, and, settling in the extreme southern portion, the hottest section of the State, has built up there, amid its waste swamp lands, an agricultural prosperity that Florida never knew under slavery and negro labor. The white men who have poured into Texas since the war, from all sections of the Union, have shown that the climate did not affect their labor in the slightest degree; but they have worked to such good purpose, that they have placed Texas at the head of the cotton States, the producer of nearly one-quarter of the entire crop." "Cotton has long since ceased to be the product of the negro.

The white States and white districts have become the cotton centres of the South. The negro parishes of Carroll, Tensas, and Madison, the finest cotton country in the world, where the yield is greater and the staple the finest, produce far smaller crops than they bore thirty years ago, while the white counties of Texas have increased their production four and five fold. This fact attracted the particular attention of Professor Hilgard, who prepared the census report on cotton, and he notes the singular coincidence that the bulk of the crop of Mississippi is raised in the hills, where the yield per acre is small, instead of in the bottoms where every condition is favorable. The fact did not seem to strike him that the true reason lay in the fact, that in the hills the cotton was raised by the whites, in the bottoms by the negroes."

With this condition of Hamitic labor, and all the resultant racial influence of this people upon pros

perity, upon morals, upon the civilization of the South, the time is at hand when the future of this race should be dispassionately considered. Southern agriculture can not always remain in its present paralyzed condition. It is mercy to consider the race question now. It may be far otherwise twenty-five years hence.

CHAPTER XIV.

NEGRO COLONIZATION.

HISTORY has no record of two races as unlike

as the Anglo-Saxon and the African, living together in harmony under like conditions. The superior race is energetic and ambitious. Every door of enterprise, of industry, of knowledge, of preferment in civil and political life, is wide open to them. It is a masterful, dominant race.

The other race is sluggish and unenterprising. Its past history is a vast Sahara. Every door of advancement, or nearly so, open to the Anglo-Saxon, is closed to the African. Hayti, with a hundred years' experience and opportunities, and the British Colonies in the West India Islands, with nearly sixty. years of freedom, and educational, civil, and political advantages, furnish no ground of hope for the Hamites of the Southern States.

The Indian has long ago been forced to move toward the setting sun. The number of Indians is insignificant. When interest puts forth its claim, the imperious superior race will demand the removal of the sons of Ham. Interests moral, social, industrial, and political are already demanding a hearing. "What shall we do with the negroes?" is impressing itself more and more upon the South