s. I have dropped the social conditions out
of the consideration, because I became convinced that the race troubles
at the South can be solved to the satisfaction of both whites and blacks
without cultivating any closer social relations than those which now
prevail. The material conditions which I have in mind are less familiar
than the political conditions; they are mainly the land-tenure and
credit systems, and mere modifications (scarcely for the better) of the
peculiar plantation system of slavery days.

The cotton lands at the South are owned now, as they were before the
war, in large tracts. The land was about all that most of the Southern
whites had left to them after the war, and they kept it when they could,
at the first, in the hope that it would yield them a living through the
labor of the blacks; of late years they have not been able to sell their
plantations at any fair price, if they desired to do so. The white men
with capital who went to the South from the North after the war seemed
to acquire the true Southern ambition to be large land owners and
planters; and when the ante-bellum owners lost their plantations the
land usually went in bulk to the city factors who had made them advances
from year to year, and had taken mortgages on their crops and broad
acres. As a consequence, the land has never been distributed among
the people who inhabit and cultivate it, and agricultural labor in the
Southern States approaches the condition of the factory labor in England
and the Eastern States more nearly than it does the farm labor of the
North and West. Nearly every agricultural laborer north of Mason and
Dixon's line, if not the actual possessor of the land he plows, looks
forward to owning a farm some time; at the South such an ambition is
rare, and small ownership still more an exception. The practice of
paying day wages was first tried after the war; this practice is still
in vogue in the sugar and rice districts, where laborers are paid from
fifty to seventy cents per day, with quarters furnished and living
guaranteed them at nine or ten cents a day. In sections where the wages
system prevails, and where there have been no political disturbances,
the negroes seem to be perfectly contented; at all events, the
emigration fever has not spread among them. But it was found
impracticable to maintain the wage system in the cotton districts. The
negroes themselves fought against it, because it reminded them too much