of our hill soils. But the trouble can be remedied by proper effort. 

 It could more easily have been avoided in the first place. 



It is not the purpose of this paper to arraign those who have 

 occupied the wasting lands in the past. The trouble grew out of 

 natural conditions for which they were not responsible. Up till 

 the Civil War conditions in Mississippi partook somewhat of 

 those of a frontier state. Our methods of agriculture were crude 

 and wasteful, but sufficient to extort from a virgin soil abundant 

 sustenance for those occupying the land; the population was far 

 too sparse to use all, or even the larger part of the land. With 

 land so abundant it was but natural that if a field grew poor 

 and unremunerative it was thrown out and more land cleared and 

 put in cultivation, resulting in a double waste a waste of land 

 and a waste of forests. Frontier people are proverbially wasteful, 

 and in those days Mississippi was a frontier state. 



What are we to say of conditions following the war? For 

 many years worse far worse than before. Our homes and 

 lands had suffered the waste of four years of destructive war ; our 

 population had been decimated, the negroes were freed, and 

 anxious to assert heir freedom moved away from the plantations. 

 A large proportion became profligate and idle loafers, seeking the 

 patronage and support of the Federal Bureaus. 



Reconstruction days, worse if anything than the war itself, 

 saw very little, if any, betterment of industrial conditions. 



When finally things settled down and it became possible to 

 begin the rebuilding process, Mississippi had a smaller white 

 population than before the war, no money with which to operate 

 and an unsatisfactory tenantry, idle and non-progressive. Neces- 

 sarily much of the poorer land's had to be abandoned. 



By far the greater part of the washed lands of the State have 

 had this history. But conditions have now changed. Our popula- 

 tion is doubled, the wealth of the State is vastly increased, and 

 while our tenantry is not yet satisfactory, there are no longer the 

 same forcible reasons, as once existed, why our waste lands 



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