Q. I do not refer simply to personal courtesy, but I mean the expression of feeling as between the sections, the general tendency and drift of Northern feeling towards the Southern portions of the country, to the people of the South?  —­A.  I think, so far as I have been able to observe, that the feeling in the East towards the South is a general anxiety for her prosperity.  I would go so far as to speak of it as anxiety for her prosperity.

Q. You think the war of sections is pretty much over?  —­A.  I think it is obliterated, and for that reason I go back to this point, that our prosperity in the South has begun.

Q. You have described with some minuteness the condition of things among the planters and those who work upon the plantations.  I should like to ask this question further, whether any of the negroes along the alluvial bottoms are obtaining ownership of lands in fee-simple?  —­A.  In very few instances in the alluvial lands.  When they make enough money to buy a home they generally go to the hill country, where land can be bought at a much more reasonable price.

Q. With what amount of accumulation will a negro get up and go to the hills?  —­A.  There are negroes right in my section of the country who have an accumulation clear of all expenses of from a thousand to $3,500 a year.

Q. Do they remain or do they go and buy homesteads for themselves?  —­A.  They probably remain until they accumulate a few thousand dollars, and then go and buy a home.  We encourage it, from the fact that we want the others behind to be stimulated to do the same thing.  I will say in that connection that the future of the negro of the South is the alluvial lands.

Q. These plantations?  —­A.  Not only these plantations particularly.  What I mean by alluvial lands are the alluvial lands on the coast and the alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley, the rich lands where the negro relies on his own energy and exertion rather than on his brains.  There is an immigration coming into the older States now.

Q. The older Southern States?  —­A.  The older Southern States.  As they come in the negroes gradually give way and go to the richer lands.  For instance, one railroad last year brought into the Mississippi Valley over 10,000 negro immigrants.

     Q. From what States? 
     —­A.  From the Atlantic and Gulf States.

Q. What became of them?  —­A.  They were scattered along the alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley.  As the negroes of the Mississippi Valley either immigrate from that valley and go in different directions and buy land, the planters of the Mississippi Valley send out to the older States and replace them with labor from those States.  A negro in the older States, probably, to make his support would have to cultivate 15 or 20 acres of land, whereas