time. Having finished his course at
Tuskegee, he returned to his plantation home, which was in a county
where the colored people outnumber the whites six to one, as is true
of many of the counties in the Black Belt of the South. He found the
negroes in debt. Ever since the war they had been mortgaging their crops
for the food on which to live while the crops were growing. The majority
of them were living from hand to mouth on rented land, in small,
one-room log cabins, and attempting to pay a rate of interest on their
advances that ranged from fifteen to forty per cent per annum. The
school had been taught in a wreck of a log cabin, with no apparatus, and
had never been in session longer than three months out of twelve. With
as many as eight or ten persons of all ages and conditions and of both
sexes huddled together in one cabin year after year, and with a minister
whose only aim was to work upon the emotions of the people, one can
imagine something of the moral and religious state of the community.

But the remedy. In spite of the evil, the negro got the habit of work
from slavery. The rank and file of the race, especially those on the
Southern plantations, work hard, but the trouble is, what they earn
gets away from them in high rents, crop mortgages, whiskey, snuff, cheap
jewelry, and the like. The young man just referred to had been trained
at Tuskegee, as most of our graduates are, to meet just this condition
of things. He took the three months' public school as a nucleus for his
work. Then he organized the older people into a club, or conference,
that held meetings every week. In these meetings he taught the people in
a plain, simple manner how to save their money, how to farm in a better
way, how to sacrifice,--to live on bread and potatoes, if need be, till
they could get out of debt, and begin the buying of lands.

Soon a large proportion of the people were in condition to make
contracts for the buying of homes (land is very cheap in the South),
and to live without mortgaging their crops. Not only this: under the
guidance and leadership of this teacher, the first year that he was
among them they learned how, by contributions in money and labor, to
build a neat, comfortable schoolhouse that replaced the wreck of a
log cabin formerly used. The following year the weekly meetings were
continued, and two months were added to the original three months of
school. The next year two more months were added. The improve