Your committee also directed their attention to the complaints frequently made with regard to the laws passed in various States of the South relating to landlord and tenant, and to the system adopted by many planters for furnishing their tenants and laborers with supplies. We found, upon investigation of these laws, and of the witnesses in relation to their operation, that as a general rule they were urgently called for by the circumstances in which the South found itself after the war. The universal adoption of homestead and personal property exemption laws deprived poor men of credit, and the landlord class, for its own protection, procured the passage of these laws giving them a lien upon the crop made by the tenant until his rents and his supplies furnished for the subsistence of the tenant and his family had been paid and discharged; and while upon the surface these laws appeared to be hard and in favor of the landlord, they were, as was actually testified by many intelligent witnesses, quite as much or more in favor of the tenant, as it enabled him to obtain credit, to subsist himself and his family, and to make a crop without any means whatsoever but his own labor. It was alleged also that in many instances landlords, or if not landlords then merchants, would establish country stores for furnishing supplies to laborers and tenants, and the laborer, having no money to go elsewhere or take the natural advantages of competition, was forced to buy at these stores at exorbitant prices.