Two circumstances complicate this development and make
it in some respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies;
they are the panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in
1898. Besides this, the system of assessing property in the
country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of
uncertain statistical value; there are no assessors, and each
man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus public
opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount
of accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the conse-
quent large dependence of their property on temporary pros-
perity. They have little to tide over a few years of economic
depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far
more than the whites. And thus the land-owners, despite their
marvellous efforts, are really a transient class, continually
being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters
or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses.
Of one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their
land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth
between 1884 and 1890, and the rest between 1870 and 1884.
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