Furthermore, the Negro might as well get fully in mind that, although the white man sometimes may win without merit (yet often fails to win even though deserving to do so), for the Negro himself, even though merit may not win, without it he will have absolutely no show. He must be not only as well adapted to an occupation, or qualified for it, as a white man but better. Until lately those especially interested in the welfare of the Negro might have entertained the hope that he would hold his place in his customary occupations or even make them in great part his very own. This would have been a kind of segregation to occupation analogous to his segregation as regards residence and at least as advantageous to him. But in hardly more than one occupation is such the case. As a porter he seems to have the field practically to himself, and as hod-carrier he is in demand. But as a barber he has fast been losing ground. The Negro as a waiter takes more pride in his occupation and is more polite and obliging than the white man of the waiter class but he is even being displaced in this work. Even as a farm laborer, for which service he has been trained for generations, he is losing his grip. “Too slow, unreliable, inefficient” are some of the counts against him. The idea that prevails outside the South that Negroes do practically all the work on Southern farms is far from the truth. More than half of the cotton crop is raised by white labor,—in Texas, three-fourths or more. Even in sugar and rice fields white labor is getting common.[156:8] Often, indeed, a farmer will not employ a Negro if he can get a white man. Indeed, the Negro farm laborer and the Negro farmer are the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of the agricultural development of the South. Were it possible to remove from the South at least three-fourths of these and replace them with whites whether native or foreign there can be no doubt that the production of Southern farms would be wonderfully increased. It is an injury to the South and to society as a whole that the Negro has under his control even as much land as at present. When his “slipshod” farming gives place to more scientific and businesslike methods there will be more farm products for distribution. The inefficiency of the Negro as a farmer is strikingly shown by a study of the conditions in several Mississippi counties: