Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty
and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to
take refuge. And to all this must be added the obvious fact
that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not
improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black
laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been
just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of
the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking
about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the
inevitable results of this pondering. I see now that ragged
black man sitting on a log, aimlessly whittling a stick. He
muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said:
"White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night
and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better
classes of Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two
things: if any way possible, they buy land; if not, they
migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for
the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so
to-day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers.
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