He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season to work a full week--and it was often only by withholding the weekly food allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or "evening," as they say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of "frolics" and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts of the houses used for firewood. Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short, so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to "pay out" and have anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or slaves. I say "a large proportion"--but there are thousands of industrious Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead--as I shall show in my next chapter. In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable number of the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in Alabama said to me: "Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn't have a low-down white tenant on my place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him; but there are some white men who won't work and can't be driven, because they are white." _Race Troubles in the Country_ In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human society--industrial and urban development--began seriously to disturb the feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea--human enough--that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are slower than men's ways, but more certain.