rather a fine disdain for mere
cash. They'll loaf before your face and work behind your back with
good-natured honesty. They'll steal a watermelon, and hand you back
your lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their
lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They
are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful;
they are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance
get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why
they should take unusual pains to make the white man's land better, or
to fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other hand, the white
land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by
increased responsibility, or higher wages, or better homes, or land of
their own, would be sure to result in failure. He shows his Northern
visitor the scarred and wretched land; the ruined mansions, the
worn-out soil and mortgaged acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!

Now it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on
their respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each
other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and
misfortunes; if he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the
fruit of his toil; if he is ignorant, it is because the white man gives
him neither time nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any
misfortune happens to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of
"white folks." On the other hand, the masters and the masters' sons
have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to
be day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire
to rise in the world, and why they are sulky, dissatisfied, and
careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. "Why,
you niggers have an easier time than I do," said a puzzled Albany
merchant to his black customer. "Yes," he replied, "and so does yo'
hogs."

Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a
starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty
have struggled from him up toward their ideal, and what that ideal is.
All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then
of social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the
following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these
Negroes.

A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who
are m