Unless this unreliability is overcome it will form even a greater handicap for the future. Southern methods of agriculture have been more wasteful of small economies than have Northern. That a change is imperative, in many districts at least, has been shown. Is the Negro in a position to take advantage of these changes? At present it must be admitted that he does not possess the knowledge to enable him to utilize his environment and make the most out of it. It has been shown that he is bearing little part in the development of the trucking industry, nay more, that he does not even raise enough garden truck for his own support. In a bulletin of the Farmer's Improvement Society of Texas I find the following: Very many, in the first place, do not try to make their supplies at home. Very often much is lost by bad fences. Lots of them don't know where their hoes, plows, single-trees, etc., are at this minute. Lots of them buy butter, peas, beans, lard, meat and hay. * * * Well, really, to sum up, if there's anything like scientific methods among the vast majority of our people I don't know it. * * * I venture to say that not one negro farmer in a hundred ever saw the back of one of these bulletins (agricultural), much less the inside. If some of these primary lessons have not been mastered what chance is there that the Negro will overcome, unaided, the crop lien system and his other handicaps and introduce diversified agriculture, stock raising, etc.? Slavery taught him something about work and he is willing to work, and work hard, under leadership. Herein lies the possibility of his economic salvation. He is not yet ready as a race to stand alone and advance at the pace demanded by America of the twentieth century. He must be taught and the teaching must be by practice as well as by precept. Viewed from this standpoint, though it is equally true from another, one of the great needs of the South is that its white farmers should pay more attention to other things than cotton. So long as land is considered too valuable to use for pasture, for hay, for the various crops on which stock live and fatten, or so long as it is considered profitable to sell cotton seed for $5 a ton and throw away four or five times this amount in the food and manure which the same seed contains, the Negro will not see the advantage of a different system. Nor does the sight of thousands of tons of rice straw dumped into the Mississippi each year, just as a generation ago the oat straw in Iowa was burned, lead him to suspect unused sources of wealth. The possibilities of Southern agriculture are great, but the lead must be taken by the whites.