Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the _spirit_ of the relationship. To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery or peonage) and he _must_ see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant overseers or "riders" who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties--how a spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired by some "bigoty nigger." "Do you know what I do with such cases?" he said. "Come with me, I'll show you." He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my arm. "When there's trouble," he said, "I just go down with that and lay one or two of 'em out. That ends the trouble. We've got to do it; they're like children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It's far better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the chain-gang." _Troubles of the Landlord_ Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all up with the remark: "You've just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children, and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how."