Moreover, the system is
bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a
little one-mule wagon on the River road. A young black
fellow sat in it driving listlessly, his elbows on his knees. His
dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid, silent.
"Hello!" cried my driver,--he has a most imprudent way
of addressing these people, though they seem used to it,
--"what have you got there?"
"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping. The meat
lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon,--a great thin side
of fat pork covered with salt; the meal was in a white bushel
bag.
"What did you pay for that meat?"
"Ten cents a pound." It could have been bought for six or
seven cents cash.
"And the meal?"
"Two dollars." One dollar and ten cents is the cash price
in town. Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which
he could have bought for three dollars cash, and raised for
one dollar or one dollar and a half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started
behind,--started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the
crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering
along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war inter-
ludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were
dead.
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