It is hardly fair to compare these people, who are at best only ten or twenty years away from the frontier, with New Englanders or Middle States or far Western farmers. In the Southern climate people get on with smaller houses, fewer fireplaces and stoves, and more ventilation through the walls. There is little necessity for large farm buildings, and the country is too rough to use much farm machinery. Their outside wants are simple--coffee, sugar, or the excellent cane-syrup, clothing (inasmuch as they no longer make their own), wagons and utensils; these can all be bought with their cotton, and they raise their own corn and "meat" (pork). In comparison with the North a fair standard would be to set a dozen of the Coosa County houses alongside a mining village in Pennsylvania, and the advantage of cleanliness, decency, and thrift would show itself on the Southern side. Those people are rising; though still alarmingly behind, both in education and in a sense of the need of education. Unusually well-to-do farmers may be found who boast that they are illiterate, and who will not send their children steadily to good schools in the neighborhood; but they are learning one of the first lessons of uplift, namely, that the preparation for later comfort is to save money. Saving means work, and perhaps the secret of the undoubted improvement of the Poor Whites is that there is work that they can do, plenty of it at good wages. That is a marvelous difference from slavery times, when there was nothing going on in their region except farming, and it was thought ignoble to work on anybody else's farm, for that was what niggers did. Nowadays some Whites are tenants or laborers on large plantations. Near Monroe, La., for instance, is a plantation carried on by Acadians brought up from lower Louisiana, with the hope that they will like it and save money enough to buy up the land in small parcels. There are plantations on which white tenants come into houses just vacated by negro tenants, on the same terms as the previous occupants; the women working in the fields, precisely as the Negroes do; there are plantations almost wholly manned by white tenants. But there are other more attractive employments, and it is so easy for the white man to buy land that there is no likelihood of the growth of a class of white agricultural laborers in the South.