Perhaps they sprang from drag-
ons' teeth. So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still
bows beneath her sceptre. Even the markets that once defied
the parvenu have crept one by one across the seas, and then
slowly and reluctantly, but surely, have started toward the
Black Belt.
To be sure, there are those who wag their heads knowingly
and tell us that the capital of the Cotton Kingdom has moved
from the Black to the White Belt,--that the Negro of to-day
raises not more than half of the cotton crop. Such men forget
that the cotton crop has doubled, and more than doubled,
since the era of slavery, and that, even granting their con-
tention, 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 hon-
estly 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.
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