70 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



the votes of this class of people. It is this element which has 

 driven the Negroes out of more than one community in the 

 South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar an- 

 tagonism of the working classes exists in the North wherever the 

 Negro has appeared in large numbers. 



On the other hand, the larger land owners and employers of 

 the South, and all professional and business men who hire 

 servants, while they dislike and fear the Negro as a race (though 

 often loving and protecting individual Negroes), want the black 

 man to work for them. More than that, they must have him : 

 for he has a practical monopoly on labor in the South. White 

 men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep the 

 Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen so long as they 

 are obedient and unambitious workers. 



But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began 

 to see that the large planters the big employers of labor often 

 pursued very different methods in dealing with the Negro. In 

 the feudal Middle Ages there were good and bad barons; so in 

 the South to-day there are "good" and "bad" landlords (for 

 lack of better designation) and every gradation between them. 



The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows 

 by inheritance how a feudal system should be operated. In 

 other words, he is the old slave-owner or his descendant, who 

 not only feels the ancient responsibility of slavery times, but 

 believes that the good treatment of tenants, as a policy, will 

 produce better results than harshness and force. 



The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal 

 system: he is in farming to make all he can out of it this year 

 and next, without reference to human life. 



Conditions in the black belt are in one respect much as they 

 were in slavery times, or as they would be under any feudal 

 system: if the master or lord is a good," the Negro prospers; 

 if he is harsh, grasping, unkind, the Negro suffers bitterly. It 

 gets back finally to the white man. In assuming supreme rights 

 in the South, political and industrial, the white man also as- 

 sumes tremendous duties and responsibilities : he cannot have the 

 one without the other; and he takes to himself the pain and suf- 

 fering which goes with power and responsibility. 



Of course, scarcity of labor and high wages have given the 



