There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is called _peonage_ and many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms of _peonage_ prevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery. All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed as _peonage_—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc. I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. He was lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belonged to them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.