But the observer who cares to look beneath the surface will detect signs of a reverse current. He will discover that there is beyond question a sure though gradual rebunching of the small farms into large estates, and a tendency toward the re-establishment of a land-holding oligarchy. Here and there through all the Cotton States, and almost in every county, are reappearing the planter princes of the old time, still lords of acres, though not of slaves. There is in Mississippi one planter who raises annually 12,000 bales of cotton on twelve consolidated plantations, aggregating perhaps 50,000 acres. The Capeheart estate on Albemarle Sound, originally of several thousand acres, had $52,000 worth of land added last year. In the Mississippi Valley, where, more than anywhere else, is preserved the distinctive cotton plantation, this re-absorbing of separate farms into one ownership is going on rapidly. Mr. F. C. Morehead, an authority on these lands, says that not one-third of them are owned by the men who held them at the close of the war, and that they are passing, one after the other, into the hands of the commission merchants. It is doubtful if there is a neighborhood in all the South in which casual inquiry will not bring to the front from ten to a dozen men who have added farm after farm to their possessions for the past several years, and now own from six to twenty places. It must not be supposed that these farms are bunched together and run after the old plantation style. On the contrary, they are cut into even smaller farms, and rented to small croppers. The question involved is not whether or not the old plantation methods shall be revived. It is the much more serious problem as to whether the lands divided forever into small farms shall be owned by the many or by the few, whether we shall have in the South a peasantry like that of France, or a tenantry like that of Ireland.