146 Musings by Camp- Fire and Wayside 



They raise cotton and buy corn and pork. Above 

 all the things that curse the farmer is the credit 

 system. I notice everywhere that a discount of 

 from fifty to two hundred per cent is made for cash. 

 They mortgage their crops for the year, before they 

 are planted, the result of all of which is miserable 

 poverty. The cotton states can never be anything 

 else but poor until there is a thorough reformation 

 of farming and business methods. 



Tuskegee is the oracle of these reforms for the 

 negroes. It is wonderful to see how keenly the 

 negro farmers are interested, and to notice their 

 pride in their success. Of course there is a vast 

 inert mass of shiftlessness and stupidity and degra- 

 dation. Bishop Turner, of the African Methodist 

 Church, is pessimistic. He sees no hope for the 

 negro in America. He asserts that the repressive 

 legislation, disfranchisement, deprival of the civil 

 rights guaranteed by the constitution, the massa- 

 cres and lynching, and the fact that the negro has 

 but little or no protection under the laws in many 

 localities, leaves him in a worse condition than he 

 was in slavery, and he advocates what he calls 

 "repatriation," but which is really expatriation — 

 the return of the negroes to Africa; and he argues 

 that it is practicable to carry over five or six mil- 

 lions of them. The bishop is bitter, as I notice 

 that our Dr. Grimke of Washington is. But the 

 sentiments of Tuskegee are most conciliatory. 

 Booker Washington is the second great emancipa- 



