A young black fellow sat in it driving listlessly,
his elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid,
silent.

"Hello!" cried my driver,--he has a most imprudent way of addressing
these people, though they seem used to it,--"what have you got there?"

"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in
the bottom of the wagon,--a great thin side of fat pork covered with
salt; the meal was in a white bushel bag.

"What did you pay for that meat?"

"Ten cents a pound." It could have been bought for six or seven cents
cash.

"And the meal?"

"Two dollars." One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town.
Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought
for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or one dollar and a
half.

Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started
behind,--started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of
this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its
Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine
matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no
easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant
families one hundred and seventy-five ended their year's work in debt
to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars; fifty cleared nothing, and
the remaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred
dollars. The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of the
whole county must have been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a more
prosperous year the situation is far better; but on the average the
majority of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that
they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organization is
radically wrong. Whose is the blame?

The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the
nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the widespread
opinion among the merchants and employers of the Black Belt that only
by the slavery of debt can the Negro be kept at work. Without doubt,
some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free-labor system
to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the
Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers.
Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of
the