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 econo-
mies 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 cul-
ture.
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