In the same way England as a whole is more dependent upon foreign countries for the sale of its manufactured products and the purchase of its food supply than is any other country in Europe. Thus it will be found that most of the great questions which are now agitating England, like most of the great questions which are agitating other countries in Europe, are more or less directly concerned with the matter of agriculture and the condition of the labourer on the land. I said in the preceding chapter that one advantage that the Negro in the South had was the opportunity to work for the asking. The Negro in the South has opportunities in another direction that no other man in his position has, outside of America: he has the opportunity to get land. No one who has not visited Europe can understand what the opportunity to get land means to a race that has so recently gained its freedom. No one who has not seen something of the hardships of the average workingman in a great city like London can understand the privilege that we in the Southern States have in living in the country districts, where there is independence and a living for every man, and where we have the opportunity to fix ourselves forever on the soil. CHAPTER IV FIRST IMPRESSION OF LIFE AND LABOUR ON THE CONTINENT One clear, cold morning, about the first of September, I took a train at Bonar Bridge, in the north of Scotland, southward bound. There was a cold wind blowing, and Bonar Bridge is about the latitude, as I learned from looking at my atlas, of northern Labrador--farther north, in fact, than I had ever in my lifetime dreamed of going. I spent the next four or five hours looking out of a car window across the bleak, brown moors, studying the flocks of sheep and the little thatch-roofed cottages clinging to the lonesome hillsides. Three days later I was in the beautiful mountain region below Dresden, on my way to Prague, the capital of Bohemia. In many ways conditions in the farming regions of Bohemia are quite as primitive as they are among the crofters of northern Scotland. There are, for example, a larger number of small farmers owning their own land in Bohemia than there are in Scotland, but the Scottish crofter, although he remains a tenant on a large estate, has, at the present time, a more secure position on the soil than the man who rents his land in Bohemia. In other respects the Scotch Highlanders, whose country I had just left, and the Czechs, whose country I was just entering, are, I should say, about as different as one could well imagine. Among other things I noticed that the farming people in this part of the world do not live apart, scattered about in the open country, as they do in Scotland, and as is the case everywhere in America. On the contrary, the Bohemian farmers live huddled together in little villages, in the centre of the surrounding fields, from which they go out to their work in the morning and to which they return in the evening.