into partnership, they are really only
laborers, and few laborers anywhere are six or eight months ahead of
destitution. How many city laborers, even those with skilled trades,
could exist without credit if their wages were paid only once a year?
How many of them would have prudence or foresight enough to conserve their
wages when finally paid and make them last until the next annual payment?
The fault for which the tenant is to be blamed is that he does not take
advantage of two courses of action open to him: first, to raise a
considerable part of the food he consumes; and second, to struggle
persistently to become independent of the merchant. Thousands of tenants
have achieved their economic freedom, and all could if they would only make
an intelligent and continued effort to do so.

Nowhere else in the United States has the negro the same opportunity to
become self-sustaining, but his improvidence keeps him poor. Too often
he allows what little garden he has to be choked with weeds through his
shiftlessness. One of the shrewdest observers and fairest critics of the
negro, Alfred Holt Stone, says of the Mississippi negro: "In a
plantation experience of more than twelve years, during which I have
been a close observer of the economic life of the plantation negro, I
have not known one to anticipate the future by investing the earnings of
one year in supplies for the next....The idea seems to be that the
money from a crop already gathered is theirs, to be spent as fancy
suggests, while the crop to be made must take care of itself, or be taken
care of by the 'white-folks.'"[1] This statement is not so true of the
negroes of the Upper South, many of whom are more intelligent, and have
developed foresight and self-reliance.

[Footnote 1: Stone. _Studies in the American Race Problem_, p. 188]

The theory that there is an organized conspiracy over the whole South to
keep the negro in a state of peonage is frequently advanced by ignorant
or disingenuous apologists for the negro, but this belief cannot be
defended. The merchants usually prefer to sell for cash, and more and
more of them are reluctant to sell on credit. In some cotton towns no
merchant will sell on credit, and the landlord is obliged to furnish
supplies to those who cannot pay. The landowners generally would much
prefer a group of prosperous permanent tenants who could be depended
upon to give some thought to the crop of the future as well as to that
of the pr