All these measures were measures of force, while nothing was done to attract laborers to the land. The only real attraction of the Negro to the country was landowning. The Negroes had succeeded in buying land: by government gift and bounty money they held about three million acres in 1875, perhaps 8,000,000 in 1890, and 12,000,000 in 1900; but distinct efforts appeared here and there to stop their buying land. There are still vast tracts of land in the South, that anybody, black or white, can buy for little or nothing, simply because it is worth little or nothing. Some time, of course, these lands will become valuable but they are not valuable to-day. Now the Negro cannot invest in this land as a speculation, for he is too poor to wait. He must have land which he knows how to cultivate, which is near a market, and which is so situated as to provide reasonable protection for his family. There are only certain crops which he knows how to cultivate. He cannot be expected to learn quickly to cultivate crops which he was not taught to cultivate in the past. He must be within reach of a market and he must have some community life with his own people and some protection from other people. All these conditions are fulfilled chiefly in the black belt. That is the cotton region, the crop which he knows best how to raise; from certain parts of it he can get to the market and he has a great black population for company and protection. But it is precisely here in the black belt that it is most difficult to buy land. Capitalistic culture of cotton, the high price of cotton, and the system of labor peonage have made land high. Moreover in most of these regions it is considered bad policy to sell Negroes land because, as has been said, this "demoralizes" labor. Thus in the densest part of the black belt in the South, the percentage of land holding is usually low among Negroes. The concentration of land-owning on the other hand in the hands of the single white proprietors has gone on to a much larger extent than the country realizes. This is shown not simply in the increase of the average size of farms in the last decade but it must also be remembered that the farms do not belong to single owners but are owned in groups of five, forty or fifty by single landed proprietors. There are 140,000 owners who own from two to fifty farms in the South and there are 50,000 owners who have over twenty farms apiece.