f the great needs of the South is that its white farmers
should pay more attention to other things than cotton. So long as land
is considered too valuable to use for pasture, for hay, for the various
crops on which stock live and fatten, or so long as it is considered
profitable to sell cotton seed for $5 a ton and throw away four or five
times this amount in the food and manure which the same seed contains,
the Negro will not see the advantage of a different system. Nor does the
sight of thousands of tons of rice straw dumped into the Mississippi
each year, just as a generation ago the oat straw in Iowa was burned,
lead him to suspect unused sources of wealth. The possibilities of
Southern agriculture are great, but the lead must be taken by the
whites.

The Negro has a great advantage over the Italian or other European
peasant in that the white man prefers him as a helper. He is patient,
docile and proud of his work. He is wanted by the native whites, and if
the reader doubts this let him go to any Southern community and attempt
to bring about any great exodus of the Negroes and he will be surprised
to find how soon he is requested to move on. This interest on the part
of the whites is a factor which must be considered. It would be a happy
day for the Negro if the white woman of the South took her old personal
interest in his welfare. This friendly sentiment will not increase with
time and each succeeding generation will emphasize, more and more,
industrial efficiency, and the Negro will not be preferred.
Corresponding to this is the fact that the Negro respects and willingly
follows the white man, more willingly and more trustingly than he does
another Negro. He is personally loyal, as the care received by the
soldiers during war time illustrated. But slavery is gone and the
feudalism which followed it is slowly yielding to commercialism, which
gives the palm to the more efficient.

Hitherto the Negro has tilled much of the best land of the South.
Meantime the great prairies have been settled and about all the good
cheap land of the northwest taken. A tide of immigration is setting in
towards the Southern states. Already the rice industry of Louisiana has
been revolutionized by white immigrants. What may this mean for the
Negro if these incoming whites defy race prejudice and seek the rich
bottom lands of the Mississippi or elsewhere? Will the Negro be in a
position of independence or will he only assist the white?