The reason for this is clear: the oppression and serfdom of the country, the opportunities of the city. It was in the town and city alone that the emerging classes, outside the landholders, were successful, and even the landholders were helped by the earnings of the city; the house servants with the upper class of barbers and caterers, the artisans, the day laborers, the professional men, including the best of the teachers, were in the cities, and the new group economy was developed here. On the other hand one of the inevitable expedients for fastening serfdom on the country Negro was enforced ignorance. The Negro school system established by the Negro reconstruction governments reached its culmination in the decade 1870-1880. Since then determined effort has been made in the country districts to make the Negro schools less efficient. To-day these schools are worse than they were twenty years ago; the nominal term is longer and the enrolment larger, but the salaries are so small that only the poorest local talent can teach. There is little supervision, there are few appliances, few schoolhouses and no inspiration. On the other hand the city schools have usually improved. It was natural that the Negro should rush city-ward toward freedom, education, and decent wages. This migration resulted in two things: in the increase and intensification of the problems of the city, and in redoubled effort to keep the Negro laborer on the plantations. To take the latter efforts first, we find that the efforts of the landlords to keep Negro labor varied from force to persuasion: force was used by the landlords to the extent of actual peonage, by which Negroes were held on plantations in large numbers; next to peonage for crime came debt peonage, which used the indebtedness of the Negro tenants to prevent their moving away; then came the system of labor contracts and the laws making the breaking of a labor contract a crime (see Note 10); after that came a crop of vagrancy laws aimed at the idle Negroes in city and town and designed to compel them to work on farms, going so far in several states as to reverse the common law principle and force the person arrested for vagrancy to prove his innocence (see Note 11). In order that the farm laborers should not be tempted away by higher wages, penalties were laid on "enticing laborers away" and agents were compelled to take out licenses which ran as high as $2,000 for each county in some states (see Note 12). Such laws and their administration required, of course, absolute control of the government and courts. This was secured by manipulation and fraud, while at the same time the landlords of the black belt usually opposed the disfranchisement of Negroes lest such a measure reduce their political influence which was based on the Negro population.