Few tenants can sustain
themselves until the crop is gathered, and a very large percentage of
them must eat and wear their crops before they are gathered--a
circumstance which will create no surprise unless the reader makes the
common error of thinking of them as capitalists. Though the landlord in
effect takes his tenants into partnership, they are really only
laborers, and few laborers anywhere are six or eight months ahead of
destitution. How many city laborers, even those with skilled trades,
could exist without credit if their wages were paid only once a year?
How many of them would have prudence or foresight enough to conserve their
wages when finally paid and make them last until the next annual payment?
The fault for which the tenant is to be blamed is that he does not take
advantage of two courses of action open to him: first, to raise a
considerable part of the food he consumes; and second, to struggle
persistently to become independent of the merchant. Thousands of tenants
have achieved their economic freedom, and all could if they would only make
an intelligent and continued effort to do so.
Nowhere else in the United States has the negro the same opportunity to
become self-sustaining, but his improvidence keeps him poor. Too often
he allows what little garden he has to be choked with weeds through his
shiftlessness.
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