ut is a garden patch large
enough to supply the family with vegetables for the entire year, but
it usually is neglected. "If they have any garden at all," says a
negro critic from Tuskegee, "it is apt to be choked with weeds and
other noxious growths. With every advantage of soil and climate and
with a steady market if they live near any city or large town, few of
the colored farmers get any benefit from this, one of the most
profitable of all industries." In marked contrast to these wild and
unkempt patches are the gardens of the Italians who have recently
invaded portions of the South and whose garden patches are almost
miraculously productive. And this invasion brings a real threat to the
future of the negro. His happy-go-lucky ways, his easy philosophy of
life, the remarkable ease with which he severs home ties and shifts
from place to place, his indifference to property obligations--these
negative defects in his character may easily lead to his economic doom
if the vigorous peasantry of Italy and other lands are brought into
competition with him.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: _History of the United States_, vol. I, p. 116.]

[Footnote 8: _Captain Canot: or Twenty Years in a Slaver_, by Brantz
Mayer. p. 94 ff.]

[Footnote 9: _The Negro in Africa and America_, p. 113.]

[Footnote 10: Coman, _Industrial History of the United States_, p.
238. Bogart gives the figures as 1,976,000 bales in 1840, and
4,675,000 bales in 1860. _Economic History of the United States_, p.
256.]

[Footnote 11: See _The Anti-Slavery Crusade_, by Jesse Macy (in _The
Chronicles of America_), Chapter VIII.]

[Footnote 12: See _The Sequel of Appomattox_, by Walter L. Fleming (in
_The Chronicles of America_), Chapter IV.]

[Footnote 13: See _The New South_ by Holland Thompson (in _The
Chronicles of America_), Chapters IV and VII.]

[Footnote 14: _Negroes in the United States_, Census Bulletin No. 129,
p. 37.]

CHAPTER IV

UTOPIAS IN AMERICA

America has long been a gigantic Utopia. To every immigrant since the
founding of Jamestown this coast has gleamed upon the horizon as a
Promised Land. America, too, has provided convenient plots of ground,
as laboratories for all sorts of vagaries, where, unhampered by
restrictions and unannoyed by inquisitive neighbors, enthusiastic
dreamers could attempt to reconstruct society. Whenever an eccentric
in Europe conceived a social panacea no matter how absurd, he said,
"Let's go to Ameri