poor schools, and the monotony, isolation and drudgery of farm life.”  Professor Scroggs, however, is wrong in thinking that the persecution of the blacks has little to do with the migration for the reason that during these years when the treatment of the Negroes is decidedly better they are leaving the South.  This does not mean that they would not have left before, if they had had economic opportunities in the North.  It is highly probable that the Negroes would not be leaving the South today, if they were treated as men, although there might be numerous opportunities for economic improvement in the North.[4]

The immediate cause of this movement was the suffering due to the floods aggravated by the depredations of the boll weevil.  Although generally mindful of our welfare, the United States Government has not been as ready to build levees against a natural enemy to property as it has been to provide fortifications for warfare.  It has been necessary for local communities and State governments to tax themselves to maintain them.  The national government, however, has appropriated to the purpose of facilitating inland navigation certain sums which have been used in doing this work, especially in the Mississippi Valley.  There are now 1,538 miles of levees on both sides of the Mississippi from Cape Girardeau to the passes.  These levees, of course, are still inadequate to the security of the planters against these inundations.  Carrying 406 million tons of mud a year, the river becomes a dangerous stream subject to change, abandoning its old bed to cut for itself a new channel, transferring property from one State to another, isolating cities and leaving once useful levees marooned in the landscape like old Indian mounds or overgrown intrenchments.[5]

This valley has, therefore, been frequently visited with disasters which have often set the population in motion.  The first disastrous floods came in 1858 and 1859, breaking many of the levees, the destruction of which was practically completed by the floods of 1865 and 1869.  There is an annual rise in the stream, but since 1874 this river system has fourteen times devastated large areas of this section with destructive floods.  The property in this district depreciated in value to the extent of about 400 millions in ten years.  Farmers from this section, therefore, have at times moved west with foreigners to take up public lands.

The other disturbing factor in this situation was the boll weevil, an interloper from Mexico in 1892.  The boll weevil is an insect about one fourth of an inch in length, varying from one eighth to one third of an inch with a breadth of about one third of the length.  When it first emerges it is yellowish, then becomes grayish brown and finally assumes a black shade.  It breeds on no other plant than cotton and feeds on the boll.  This little animal, at first attacked the cotton crop in Texas.  It was not thought that it would extend its work into the