“Negroes care nothing for ‘rights.’ They know intuitively that their place is in the field; their proper instruments of self-preservation, the shovel and the hoe; their _Ultima Thule_ of happiness, plenty to eat, a fiddle, and a breakdown. “Sambo feels in his heart that he has no right to sit at white man’s table; no right to testify against his betters. Unseduced by wicked demagogues, he would never dream of these impossible things. “Let us trust that _our_ Legislature will make short work of Ethiopia. Every real white man is sick of the negro, and the ‘rights’ of the negro. Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by _our_ white laws; if not, this Southern road will be ‘a hard one to travel,’ for the whites must and shall rule to the end of time, even if the fate of Ethiopia be annihilation.” CHAPTER XLI. Cotton Speculations—Temper of the Mississippians. Western men, seeking Southern speculations, mainly centered in New Orleans during the winter. Competition had already put up prices enormously. An army officer had recently _leased_ a cotton plantation, above Miliken’s Bend, for seven dollars an acre! A few months earlier he might have bought such plantations at a similar figure; but in November he was able to sell out his lease at an advance of three dollars an acre! Within another month rents advanced to twelve and fourteen dollars an acre, for good plantations, fronting on the Mississippi. From Memphis down, wherever the river plantations were above overflow, they commanded prices that, compared with those of three months before, seemed extravagantly high, although they did not yet reach the average of prosperous times. Two-thirds of these plantations were fairly roofed in with mortgages, so that enforced sales were soon likely to become abundant. Scores of planters were already announcing their anxiety to borrow money on almost any conceivable terms, to carry on operations for the next year. Many sought to borrow on the security of the consignment of their crops. Others offered still higher inducements. Small planters from the interior of Mississippi, proposed to a heavy capitalist, in considerable numbers, to borrow severally ten to fifteen thousand dollars, to mortgage their plantations as security for the loan, and give the consignment of one-half the crop as interest for the year’s use of the money. Manifestly all such men were making a desperate venture, in the hope that a combination of good crops and high prices might enable them to hold on to their lands, and escape bankruptcy. Everybody was overrun with “estimates,” presented by sanguine planters, as proof of their ability to repay the money they were borrowing. Here is a specimen of this speculative figuring, made out by a Lake Providence lessee, for his fifteen hundred acres of heavy, rich cotton land: