him with home comforts, and imposing upon him the responsibilities of his business.  Who will make the best citizen or laborer, he who goes to a home with a week’s rations, wages spent, wife and children hired out, or he who returns to a home surrounded with the ordinary comforts, and wife and children helping him to enjoy the products of their joint labor?  We recognize that no country can be prosperous unless the farmers are prosperous.  Under our system, we seek to have our property cultivated by a reliable set of tenants, who will be able to always pay their rent and have a surplus left.

Again, a large portion of the cotton crop of the country is made by small white farmers.  These to a great extent are raising their own supplies, and making cotton a surplus crop.  The number who do this will increase year by year.  It must be apparent that the large planters cannot afford to hire labor and compete with those whose cotton costs nothing except the expenditure of their own muscle and energy.  The natural consequence resulting from this condition of things is that the negro, if he is to prosper, must gradually become a small farmer, either as a tenant or the owner of the soil, and look himself upon cotton as a surplus crop.

Q. 8.  What is the relation existing between the planters and their employers?  —­A.  Friendly and harmonious.  The planter feel an interest in the welfare of his laborers, and the latter in turn look to him for advice and assistance.

Q. 9.  What danger is there of strikes?  —­A.  Very little.  As a rule the laborers are interested in the production of the soil, and a strike would be as disastrous to them as it would be to the proprietors.  There is really very little conflict between labor and capital.  The conflict in my section, if any should come in future, will not assume the form of labor against capital, but of race against race.

Q. 10.  How can the interest of the laborers of your section be best subserved?  —­A.  By the establishment by the States of industrial schools, by the total elimination from Federal politics of the so-called negro question, and by leaving the solution to time, and a reduction of taxation, both indirect and incidental.  It is a noteworthy fact that the improvement of my section has kept pace, pari passu, with the cessation of the agitation of race issues.  The laborers share equally with the landowners the advantages of the improvement, and there is every reason to expect increasing and permanent prosperity if all questions between the landowners and their laborers in our section are left to the natural adjustment of the demand for labor.  For many years the negroes regarded themselves as the wards of the Federal Government, and it were well for them to understand that they have nothing more to expect from the Federal Government, than the white man, and that, like him, their future depends upon their own energy, industry, and