Let a Southern writer describe his own ante-bellum neighbors: "These folk of unmixed English stock could not cook; but held fast to a primitive and violent religion, all believers expecting to go to heaven. What, therefore, did earthly poverty matter? They were determined not to pay more taxes. They were suspicious of all proposed changes; and to have a school or a good school, would be a violent change. They were 'the happiest and most fortunate people on the face of the globe.' Why should they not be content?... holding fast to the notion that they are a part of a long-settled life; fixed in their ways; unthinking and standing still; ... unaware of their own discomfort; ignorant of the world about them and of what invention, ingenuity, industry, and prosperity have brought to their fellows, and too proud or too weak to care to learn these things." What is the present condition of the Poor White? The greater number of white rural families own their farms, though there is a considerable class of renters; and they till them in the wasteful and haphazard fashion of the frontier. Their stock is poor and scanty, except that they love a good horse. Most of their food except sugar they raise on their own places, and up to a few years ago they were clad in homespun. There are still areas such as southern Arkansas and northern Florida in which the life of the Poor Whites has little changed in half a century. Otherwise, if one now seeks to find this primitive and sordid life in the South, he will need to search a long time. After the Civil War the disbanded soldiers went back to their cabins, and for a time resumed their old habits, but at present they are undergoing a great and significant change. Though there are five or six millions of Poor Whites scattered through the South, especially in the remote hill country, for the most part away from the rich cotton lands and the great plantations, you may literally travel a thousand miles through the back country without finding a single county in which they do not show a distinct uplift. Take a specific example. On January 2, 1908, on a steamer making its way up the Mississippi River, was a family of typical Poor Whites, undersized, ill-fed, unshaven, anæmic, unprogressive, moving with their household gods, the only deck passengers among the Negroes in the engine room. On inquiring into the case, it came out that they could no longer afford to pay the rent on the tenant farm which they had occupied for several years. "How do you expect to get started on a new farm?" "Oh, we've got some stock. You see it right over there on the deck. Seven head of cows." "That isn't your wagon, I suppose, that good painted wagon?" "Oh, yes, that's our wagon, and them's our horses, three of 'em." "Is that pile of furniture and household goods yours too?" "Yes, that plunder's ours; we've got everything with us. You see I want to take my little boys where they