258 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



much of it valuable for its mineral resources, much of it fertile beyond 

 imagination, all of it abounding in the natural advantages of forests 

 and streams. The feudal agricultural system originally undertaken 

 was outgrown even before the American Revolution; and abetted and 

 was itself sustained by negro slavery, wh?ch worked its curse upon the 

 land in so many ways. The Civil War, with the political reconstruc- 

 tion period, the fear of yellow fever and its occasional ravages, the 

 constant menace of malaria, which killed or weakened all but the 

 favored few who could command cinchona in the rich marshy districts; 

 all these were factors. But among them uncinariasis (the hook-worm 

 disease) stands with malaria as worse than war and the devastation 

 of battles and worse than all the other pathogenic agencies in com- 

 bination. Through the influence of one or both of these diseases the 

 men and women of the South, bred from the best American Colonial 

 stock, offspring of pioneers, with the blood of English gentry and 

 Continental cavaliers in their veins, sank lower and lower in physical 

 degradation and squalor; were derided and denounced as lazy and 

 shiftless, and condemned in popular opinion as a disgrace and worth- 

 less. But in reality their languor was not the product of the balmy 

 breezes or the luxurious bounty of nature, as often charged. These 

 people were sick; some died. They did not themselves know their 

 true state, and in the lethargy of the disease they were not interested 

 enough to deny the wholesale charges against them. When spared 

 by death and come to parenthood the sallow, hollow-faced weaklings 

 created offspring who died or grew up in turn to inefficiency. 



D. Incentive and Discouragement 

 75. GOOD AND BAD MANAGEMENT OF FARM LABORERS 1 



Universally we are running our farms with insufficient labor. As 

 a consequence the work piles up and we push and sweat and fume. 

 We work one man to death, hang his hide on the fence, and hire 

 another. By working the land with insufficient labor we are thwarting 

 all of our highest ambitions as farmers. We deplete the soil, retard 

 development, impoverish the home life, break our own lives, and dis- 

 courage the young and drive them from the soil, thus increasing the 



1 Adapted from "Rural Social Problems," Fourth Annual Report of the Wis- 

 consin Country Life Conference, abstract of remarks of W. J. Dougan and W. M. 

 Leiserson, pp. 3-5. 



