that, even granting
their contention, the Negro is still supreme in a Cotton Kingdom larger
than that on which the Confederacy builded its hopes. So the Negro
forms to-day one of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and
this, for its own sake, and in the light of historic interest, makes
the field-hands of the cotton country worth studying.

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and
carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or
perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are
loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really
know of these millions,--of their daily lives and longings, of their
homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of
their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the
masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in
time and space, and differing widely in training and culture. To-day,
then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the Black Belt of Georgia and
seek simply to know the condition of the black farm-laborers of one
county there.

Here in 1890 lived ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The
country is rich, yet the people are poor. The keynote of the Black
Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued
inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income
cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the
wasteful economies of the slave regime; but it was emphasized and
brought to a crisis by the Emancipation of the slaves. In 1860,
Dougherty County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half
millions of dollars; its farms were estimated at three
millions,--making five and a half millions of property, the value of
which depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculative
demand for land once marvellously rich but already partially
devitalized by careless and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a
financial crash; in place of the five and a half millions of 1860,
there remained in 1870 only farms valued at less than two millions.
With this came increased competition in cotton culture from the rich
lands of Texas; a steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed,
from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents
in 1898. Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners
of the cotton-belt in debt. And if things went ill