is by no means an easy one to discuss, as reliable
data are fragmentary and widely scattered; yet I am sure that I have
been able to collect some interesting and valuable facts and figures
bearing upon this important question. There is no doubt that the Negro
as a tenant farmer is a failure; this we are forced to admit, but we
do so with a justly proud feeling that it is not an inherent race
characteristic, but the result of conditions over which we had little
or no control. Failure is inevitably and indelibly stamped in the
foreheads of any class of average tenant farmers, regardless of race
or color.

In American agriculture the Negro has always held, and is yet holding,
an important place; in fact, far more, as a rule, than has been
accredited to him. Lest our judgment be too harsh in this particular,
I have thought it wise to briefly scan the beginning and development
of agriculture in the United States. In 1492 the first settlers found
the Indians carrying on agriculture in a crude and limited way, by the
women; their farm machinery consisting of their fingers, a pointed
stick for planting, and the bones of animals and the shell of the clam
for a hoe; with nothing more than a squatter's right as a voucher for
the ownership of their farms. Prof. McMaster's History of the People
of the United States, George K. Holmes, assistant statistician of the
United States Department of Agriculture, in his "Progress of
Agriculture in the United States," and other high authorities, tell us
that the white man came, poor in the materials of wealth, a stranger
in a strange land with a strange climate. His tools were but little,
if any, improvement on those of the Indians, and agriculture as we
know it to-day was an idealistic dream. The plow was an exceedingly
crude thing and but little used, the hoe forming the principal
implement of industry. After a piece of land had been continuously
"cropped" until worn out, it was abandoned, or the cows turned upon it
for a while. It is further said that the poor whites, who had formerly
been indentured servants, were the most lazy, the most idle, the most
shiftless and the most worthless of men. Their huts were scarcely
better than Negro cabins, the chimneys were of logs, the chinks being
filled with clay. The walls had no plaster, the windows had no glass,
and the furniture was such as they themselves made.

The grain was threshed by driving horses over it in the open field.
When they gro