etayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and
wage-laborers. There are left five per cent of money-renters and six
per cent of freeholders,--the "Upper Ten" of the land. The croppers
are entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or
money to keep them from seed-time to harvest. All they furnish is
their labor; the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and
house; and at the end of the year the laborer gets from a third to a
half of the crop. Out of his share, however, comes pay and interest
for food and clothing advanced him during the year. Thus we have a
laborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose
capital is largely his employees' wages. It is an unsatisfactory
arrangement, both for hirer and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor
land with hard-pressed owners.

Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work
the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton and
supported by the crop-mortgage system. After the war this system was
attractive to the freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its
possibility for making a surplus. But with the carrying out of the
crop-lien system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of
debt, the position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of
practically unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had some capital,
and often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-rent, and
failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and probably not
over half of them to-day own their mules. The change from cropper to
tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed
was reasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the
other hand, if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the
result was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peasantry.
There is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in Dougherty
County every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and of
the strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the
landlords and merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest. If
cotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the
rent remained or followed reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and
raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year
the crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt.
There were, of course, exceptions to this,--ca