or honest work.  It was from this class of vermin that the planters secured their “Nigger drivers” or overseers, and a more pliable, servile, cruel, heartless set of men never existed.  They were commonly known as “poor white trash,” or “crackers.”  They were most heartily and righteously detested by the slave population.  As the poor whites of the South were fifty years ago, so they are to-day—­a careless, ignorant, lazy, but withal, arrogant set, who add nothing to the productive wealth of the community because they are too lazy to work, and who take nothing from that wealth because they are too poor to purchase.  They have graded human wants to a point below which man could not go without starving.  They live upon the poorest land in the South, the “piney woods,” and raise a few potatoes and corn, and a few pigs, which never grow to be hogs, so sterile is the land upon which they are turned to “root, or die.”  These characteristic pigs are derisively called “shotes” by those who have seen their lean, lank and hungry development.  They are awful counterparts of their pauper owners.  It may be taken as an index of the quality of the soil and the condition of the people, to observe the condition of their live stock.  Strange as it may appear, the faithful dog is the only animal which appears to thrive on “piney woods” land.  The “piney woods” gopher, which may be not inappropriately termed a “highland turtle,” is a great desideratum in the food supply of the pauper denizens of these portions of the South.  There is nothing enticing about the appearance of the gopher.  But his flesh, properly cooked, is passably palatable.

The poor white population of the South who live in the piney woods are sunk in the lowest ignorance, and practice vices too heinous to be breathed.  They have no schools, and their mental condition hardly warrants the charitable inference that they would profit much if they were supplied with them.  Still, I would like to see the experiment tried.  Their horrible poverty, their appalling illiteracy, their deplorable moral enervation, deserve the pity of mankind and the assistance of philanthropic men and a thoughtful government.  Though sunk to the lowest moral scale, they are men, and nothing should be omitted to improve their condition and make them more useful members of the communities in which they are now more than an incubus.

It may not be out of place here to state that the Kuklux Klan, the White Liners League, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other lawless gangs which have in the past fifteen years made Southern chivalry a by-word and reproach among the nations of the earth, were largely recruited from this idle, vicious, ignorant class of Southerners.  They needed no preparation for the bloody work perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than Italian brigands.  They instinctively hate the black man; because the condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and