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 accommoda-
tions, 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.
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