This is a great misfortune to the race, because, as Booker Washington never wearies of pointing out, now is the golden time for the Negro to acquire land. After the war, good farm land could be bought up at from $1 to $5 an acre; and to-day a family with $500 in cash, and saving habits, can, in most parts of the South, pick up an out-of-the-way corner of land, with a poor house on it, and begin the kind of struggle to support the family and pay for improvements which has been the practice of the Northwest. It is true that good land has now become expensive; there are under-drained Delta lands which are held at $50 to $100 an acre, and although planters grumble at the trouble and loss of making cotton with shiftless hands, not one in a hundred wants to break up his plantation and sell it out to the Negroes. The successful communities of negro farmers who have acquired land during the last ten years have, with half a dozen exceptions, been organized by Northern capitalists, or philanthropists who have bought estates in order to sell them out. The reason for this reluctance of the planter is very simple: his business is to raise cotton on a large scale; if he sells out even at a good figure, he loses his occupation; and the South, as a community, has not yet seized the great principle that the prosperity of everybody is enhanced by an increase in the productive and purchasing power of the laborer. No figures can be found for the city real estate holdings of Negroes, but in 1900 there were 188,000 so-called farms owned by Negroes, subject, of course, like white property, to mortgages for part of the purchase money, or for debts afterward incurred. In addition, 560,000 negro families were working plots of land, as croppers and renters, and received either a share or the whole of the crop that they made. These people altogether were working 23,000,000 acres, an average of about 30 acres to a family; and produced $256,000,000 worth of products. These 750,000 "farmers" represent something over 3,000,000 individuals, which figures to an annual output of $80 per head; and it is difficult to see how that value could possibly be produced if the Negroes were not there. The families of the day laborers count up to at least 3,000,000 more; and their product was probably somewhere near as large as that of the renters and croppers, although the share of the planter is rather greater. It would seem reasonable to assert that $500,000,000 of the $1,200,000,000 of farm products in the South was raised by negro labor; and that by their work in the cities and towns they probably add another $200,000,000 to the annual product.