UT of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling unlovely villages; but we did not nod and weary of the scene for this is historic ground. Right across our track DeSoto wandered 360 years ago; here lies busy Atlanta, the City of the Poor White, and on to the southwest we passed into the land of Cherokees, the geographical centre of the Negro Problems-the centre of those 9,000,000 men who are the dark legacy of slavery. Georgia is not only thus in the middle of the black population of America,

but in many other respects this race question has focused itself here. No other state can count as many as 850,000 Negroes in its population, and no other state fought so long and and strenuously to gather this host of Africans.

On we rode. The bare red clay and pines of North Georgia began to disappear, and in their place came rich rolling soil, here and there well tilled. Then the land and the people grew darker, cotton fields and delapidated buildings appeared, and we entered the Black Belt.

Two hundred miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one

full possession of the town. They are uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a degree, yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-Pfalz, Naples, or Cracow. They drink a good deal of whiskey, but they do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at times, but they seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the streets, meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop-windows, buy coffee, cheap candy and clothes, and at dusk drive home happy.

Thus Albany is a real capital-a typical southern country town, the centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for buying and selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice and law.

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. And yet, how little we know of these millions

This is the Cotton Kingdom, the shadow of a dream of slave empire which for a generation intoxicated a people. Yonder is the

keeping; despite all this, the truth remains that half the cotton-growers of the south are nearly bankrupt and the black laborer in the cotton fields is a serf.

The key-note of the Black Belt is debt. Not credit, in the commercial sense of the term, but debt in the sense of continued inability to make income cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the south from the wasteful economics of the slave regime, but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the emancipation of the slaves. In 1860 Dougherty County had 6,079 slaves worth probably $2,500,000; its farms were estimated at $2,995,923. Here was $5,500,000 of property, the value of which depended largely on the slave system, and on the speculative demand for land once marvellously rich, but already devitalized by careless and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash; in place of the $5,500,000 of 1860, there remained in 1870 only farms valued at $1,739,470. With this came increased competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of Texas, a steady fall in the price of cotton followed from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860* until it reached four cents in 1893. Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners of the cotton belt in debt. debt. And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with the man?

heir of its ruins a black renter, fighting a failing battle with debt. A feeling of silent depression falls on one as he gazes on this scarred and stricken land, with its silent mansions, deserted cabins and fallen fences. Here is a land rich in natural resources, yet poor; for despite the fact that few industries pay better dividends than cotton manufacture; despite the fact that the modern dry-goods store with its mass of cotton-fabrics represents the high-water mark of retail store

The plantations of Dougherty in slavery days were not so imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big House was smaller and usually one-storied, and set very near the slave cabins.

The form and disposition of the laborers' cabins throughout the Black Belt, is to-day, *Omitting famine prices during the war.