careless and
fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war and
Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction,--and now, what is the
Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for the nation's weal
or woe?

It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain.
Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare feet; she was
married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young
husband, hoeing to support her, at thirty cents a day without board.
Across the way is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres
shrewdly won and held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a
blacksmith shop, and a ginnery. Five miles below here is a town owned
and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns almost a Rhode
Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds of black laborers.
Their cabins look better than most, and the farm, with machinery and
fertilizers, is much more business-like than any in the county,
although the manager drives hard bargains in wages. When now we turn
and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of
prostitutes,--two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the
houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two
years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high
whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called;
the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals,--the black
folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because
they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its
income by their forced labor.

Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride
westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach
and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land
of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting,
born in the swift days of Reconstruction,--"improvement" companies,
wine companies, mills and factories; most failed, and foreigners fell
heir. It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The
forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is
the "Oakey Woods," with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks and
palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the
merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to
the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow