ty
County one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two
rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes
there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New
York do not have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of
course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is in many
respects worse than the larger single country room. In other respects
it is better; it has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy
floor. The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may
spend most of his life outside his hovel, in the open fields.

There are four chief causes of these wretched homes: First, long custom
born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes; white laborers
would be offered better accommodations, and might, for that and similar
reasons, give better work. Secondly, the Negroes, used to such
accommodations, do not as a rule demand better; they do not know what
better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords as a class have not yet
come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the
standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods; that a
Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give
more efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler
herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly,
among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the
laborer become a better farmer. If he is ambitious, he moves to town
or tries other labor; as a tenant-farmer his outlook is almost
hopeless, and following it as a makeshift, he takes the house that is
given him without protest.

In such homes, then, these Negro peasants live. The families are both
small and large; there are many single tenants,--widows and bachelors,
and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the
houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups: the grown
children go away as contract hands or migrate to town, the sister goes
into service; and so one finds many families with hosts of babies, and
many newly married couples, but comparatively few families with
half-grown and grown sons and daughters. The average size of Negro
families has undoubtedly decreased since the war, primarily from
economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over
half the brides are under twenty; the same was true of the antebellum
Negroes. Today, howev