they own 13,000 acres of
land free from any encumbrance. Mr. Fitch further adds that he has
traveled quite thoroughly through more than ten counties of Virginia,
with horse and buggy, during the present year (1896), and that in no
county through which he traveled did the Colored people own less than
5,000 acres of land. He found also that much of the improved farming
was being done by Colored men, and that the strong public sentiment
against moving to cities was having the desired effect.

Again, the statistician reports, in 1890, 12,690,152 homes and farms
in the United States, and of this number the Negroes own 234,747 free
from all encumbrance, and 29,541 mortgaged; giving the percentage of
mortgaged property owned by Negroes as 10.71, while the whole
percentage of mortgaged property for the whole country is 38.97. It is
further stated that of all the property held by Negroes, 88.58 per
cent is owned without encumbrance. Since so much has been accomplished
in the Negro's pioneer days of freedom, may we not predict with a
considerable degree of assurance that the next decade and a half will
far exceed our most sanguine hope? The virgin fertility of our soils,
and the vast amount of cheap and unskilled labor, have been a curse
rather than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system of
cultivation, the destruction of forests, the rapid and almost constant
decomposition of organic matter, together with the great multiplicity
of insect and fungus diseases that appear every year, make the
Southern agricultural problem one requiring more brains than that of
the North, East or West. The advance of civilization has brought, and
is constantly bringing, about a more healthy form of competition. The
markets are becoming more fastidious, and he who puts such a product
upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of
color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.

We are also aware that the demands upon agriculture were never so
exacting as they are now. All other trades and professions are holding
out their inducements to the young men and women who are ready and
willing to grapple with life's responsibilities. One says, "Come and I
will make you a Gould." Another, a Rockefeller; still another, an
Astor--with all the luxuries their names suggest. Too many of our own
farmers illy prepare their land, cultivate, harvest and market the
scanty and inferior crop, selling the same for less than it cost to
prod