ances are paid in full, and shall be additional security
for this debt. There is no lien or encumbrance upon any property
conveyed by this instrument except that held by Jones and Co. and
the above specified rents. If, before the demands hereby secured
are payable, any of the property conveyed herein shall be in
_danger of (or from) waste, destruction or removal, said demands
shall be then payable and all the terms, rights and powers of this
instrument operative and enforceable, as if and under a past due
mortgage_.

Witness my hand and seal this 10th day of January, 1900.

ATTEST: B. C. COOK. SAM SMALL. L. S.
R. J. BENNETT.

It may be granted that experience has shown all this verbiage to be
necessary. In the hands of an honest landlord it is as meaningless as
that in the ordinary contract we sign in renting a house. In the hands
of a dishonest landlord or merchant it practically enables him to make a
serf of the Negro. The mortgage is supposed to be filed at once, but it
is sometimes held to see if there is any other security which might be
included. The rascally creditor watches the crop and if the Negro may
have a surplus he easily tempts him to buy more, or more simply still,
he charges to his account imaginary purchases, so that at the end of the
year the Negro is still in debt. The Negro has no redress. He can not
prove that he has not purchased the goods and his word will not stand
against the merchant's. Practically he is tied down to the land, for no
one else will advance him under these conditions. Sometimes he escapes
by getting another merchant to settle his account and by becoming the
tenant of the new man. When it is remembered that land is abundant and
good labor rare, the temptation to hold a man on the land by fair means
or foul is apparent. Moreover, the merchant by specious reasoning often
justifies his own conduct. He says that the Negro will spend his money
at the first opportunity and that he might just as well have it as some
other merchant. I would not be understood as saying that this action is
anything but the great exception but there are dishonest men everywhere
who are ready to take advantage of their weaker fellows and the Negro
suffers as a result, just as the ignorant foreigner does in the cities
of the North.

The interest may also be reckoned into the face of the mortgage. In any
case it begins the