the technical skill and the managerial ability of the farmer; and reliable facts are difficult to assemble because book-keeping and cost accounting are rare in farm areas. The best we have been able to learn about the cost of producing cotton is barely better than a mathematical guess more or less approximate.

And we know almost as little about the net labor income of the cotton farmer. It is a problem of the same character and complexity as that of reckoning the unit cost of cotton production, and the usual results of farm income surveys in the cotton belt are little more than arithmetical approximations.

But we can know about the gross money incomes of farmers. That information is as simple as abc's. We know about the gross money incomes of 329 farmers in two Chatham county townships in 1921-about (1) the cash incomes sourced in farm activities and interests, and (2) the casual money received from all other sources.

And no matter what their net incomes were, their gross incomes in money were a beggar's pittance, ranging from eight cents a day per person in the household of white croppers to 34 cents per person in the household of white farm owners.

Why ask about the net money incomes of people with pitiful money rewards of this sort? We know without asking that surplus cash for comforts and luxuries, for teachers and preachers, for books and papers, for church causes and tax treasuries is scarce-how scarce these farmers alone know; and this scarcity imperils every forward movement in the community and in the commonwealth alike.

Here is the explanation of the farmer's interest in taxes and tax propositions. His interest is simple and single-he is opposed as a class to anything that increases his taxes. And his opposition is not sourced in stupidity nor in miserly reluctance: it is sourced in a collapsed pocket book.

II

The Social Estate of White Farm Tenants

Having considered (1) the property possessions and (2) the gross money incomes of 329 farmers, owners and tenants, black and white, in the area surveyed, let us now turn our attention to the 51 white tenants alone, and ask who they are, how they live, their chances at farm ownership under present conditions by self-effort alone, the need for outside aid, the number who could be aided in this territory, the probable number of such tenants in the state-at-large, and the feasible forms of aid that the state might effectively offer.

1. Who They Are. These fifty-one white tenants fall into three classes, (1) twenty-five renters living on and cultivating family lands, (2) thirteen renters with no landowning ancestry-with one exception the sons of landless tenant farmers, and (3) thirteen croppers who are without neighborhood kinship in land tenures-pilgrims, strangers and sojourners in the land, with little or no workstock and farm implements of their own, and

a minimum worldly wealth in household goods and utensils or with an average of only $426 per family, which is only $17 more than that of the 66 negro renters alongside whom they struggle for existence.

(1) The twenty-five white renters living on family lands are distinctly a preferred class of tenant farmers-here as everywhere else in the South. They are the sons, sons-in-law, or nephews of their landlords. They rent on favorable terms, they share in small or large measure in the properties and products of tribal farming-in fruits, vegetables, poultry, butter and eggs, in milk animals, workstock and implements, in automobiles and buggies in trips to town on week days and to church on Sundays, and so on and on. What they need they borrow from the homefolks. They belong to the landed gentry. They enjoy the social estate of the land owners. They live and move on a level with the best in the neighborhood. They are apprenticeship farmers who look forward with more or less certainty to land-ownership by gift, inheritance, marriage, or purchase on easy terms. They know, none better, that farming is no maypole dance; but there are better days in store-not affluence and ease to be sure, but the prideful ownership of farms of their own and life on the highest levels in their home community and county. They are born and bred to farming and the way ahead is open. Many of them choose to be farmers as a way of life despite the call of the crowds in mill towns and city centers. Many or most of the five thousand additional white farm owners in North Carolina in the last census period rose into land-ownership out of this class.

Of the 135 white farm owners in the area covered by this survey fiftyfour or two-fifths received their farms by gift, inheritance or marriage during the last twenty years, and of the 51 white tenants at present twenty-five or nearly exactly one-half are tenants on family lands, and are heading into ownership by birth or wedlock. Kith and kin relationships are now and have always been the South's main reliance for increases in the number of landowning farmers and for a stable agriculture based on ownership.

But mark this these young people, bred to the purple of farm ownership, are the very farmers who can most easily move out of farm territories and adopt the manners and habits of city life; and under boll weevil conditions this is what they are doing in appalling numbers. So because the ownership of land in these devastated areas means farm profits and rent revenues reduced to zero, and farming as a business rendered unattractive or impossible. More and more they are turning away from farming as a livelihood in the South, and as a consequence farm tenancy in the cottontobacco belt moves steadily toward the peasant type of European countries. The South, in short, is developing a kind of farm tenancy that is unknown elsewhere in the United States. In the North and West farm tenancy is a capitalistic enterprise; in the south is a social estate.*

It would be impossible in any cotton-belt county to find a fifth of the tenants operating with capital ranging from $3,000 to $9,000 each, as in Chester county, Penn., or one hundred tenants each operating with capital ranging from $20,000 to $60,000 and over, as in Iowa. See figures in Bizzell's Tenantry in the United States, pp. 137, 143. Tenancy in the South is not a matter of deliberate choice on part of farmers with operating capital; it is a matter of hard necessity on part of moneyless men.

(2) The thirteen white renters who are not living on family lands are all-or all but one-the sons of renters or croppers. They were not born to landownership. If ever they own farms of their own, they must depend on self-effort alone-on industry, thrift, sagacity, sobriety and integrity. Their lot in life is toil. With only two exceptions, their wives are hoehands in the fields, from eight to ten hours a day during periods ranging from thirty to two hundred days of the year according to family circumstances. One of these women is a mother fifty-one years old. The unbroken rule is to send the children, both boys and girls alike, into field work at seven or eight years of age-so because there is no hired labor to be had and no money with which to pay such labor.

The family property these self-help white renters have been able to accumulate ranges from $243 to $1405 in value; the average is $424 or only $153 less than the worldly possessions of the renters seated on family lands. Their ownership of workstock and farm tools is an evidence of industry and thrift. In varying degrees it indicates a look upward out of tenancy into ownership. A further indication of industry is afforded by the fact that their average annual cash income per family is nearly $100 more than that of the white croppers-$251 against $153. They own no more personal property than the white croppers, but they work harder and look higher. As for social status, they are fairly on a level with the preferred class of white renters on family lands. White owners and tenants of both classes worship together in the churches, their children play together at school and vie with one another for applause at the school commencements, their families exchange visits freely, they fish and hunt together in the open seasons. There are no apparent class differences between white renters and white farm owners in this territory. Both types of renters those living on family lands and those without kinship to their landlords are fairly stable types, living as they do on the same farms or in the same neighborhoods year after year. The stability of the white renters is best indicated by the ownership of milk cows. Twenty-nine of the thirty-eight own forty-one cows; eight of these own two cows each and two own three cows each. Only nine renters own no cows and three of these renters have the use of cows belonging to their landlords. Tenants of migratory instincts and habits rarely ever own cows-they are a bother in moving. In this tenancy area milk and butter are abundant staples of family diet; which puts Chatham in sharp contrast with the all-cotton counties of the Tidewater and the Coastal Plains. These renters are people of stable citizenship, or so in the main. Good tenants are too hard to get and to keep, for the landlords to be over-exacting in rent contracts and business dealings. Many of these self-help tenants have been on the same farms year after year. The ratio of change from year to year is less than one-fifth, against one-half in the cotton belt of the State and the South.

(3) The thirteen white croppers are in a different category in many or most particulars. And mind you, they are a fourth of the white tenants in this territory. They lack industry in the area surveyed; as shown

by the fact that their average annual cash income per family is $44 less than that of the black croppers, nearly $100 less than that of white renters, and $136 less than that of the black renters. They lack aspiration, as shown by the fact that they own little or no workstock and farm tools, without which they could not hope to rise out of tenancy into ownership. They lack the home-owning aspirations and virtues of the thirteen self-help farmers in the class next above them. Their standards of living are higher but their levels of life are lower than those of the black farmers alongside whom they live and work; inevitably so because their average cash income is less-22 percent less than that of the black croppers, 47 percent less than that of the black renters, and 74 percent less than that of the black owners. They suffer in personal and in family pride. They move from pillar to post from year to year. They are a migratory type of farmers. They are cursed with the restless foot of the Wandering Jew. They lack identity with the community in which they live. They lack abiding citizenship and a sense of proprietary interest in schools and churches and neighborhood enterprises. They lack a sense of responsibility for community morals, law and order. They live on an average cash income of eight cents a day per family member in the area surveyed and upon some such pauper wage the South over. They are unduly tempted into the business of making and vending illicit liquors. They furnish a disproportionate percent of the white cases on the criminal court dockets. They are satisfied with their landless lot in life. They are a contented not a bold peasantry, in Goldsmith's phrase, but they are not their country's pride. As a class they are a doubtful economic asset and a distinct social menace. Or so they are as a rule in Chatham, in every other county of the state-in this state and in every other state of the cotton and tobacco belt.

2. The Homes They Live In. From this point on we group both types of white renters together, because they live on almost exactly the same social level. The differences are trivial and not worth noting. From time to time we deal with the white croppers separately because they are a class occupying a distinctly lower level of existence.

The households of the thirty-eight white renters number 178 souls. The children number 101 and sixty of these are children of school ages. The dwellings they live in are usually of board and timber construction, a few are old log houses, the left-over remains of former days. Six of them let in the weather through the roofs or the floors and walls. Twenty have 203 window lights out and ten have shutters off. In more than half of these dwellings it is possible to study astronomy through the holes in the roof and geology through the cracks in the floor. There is a separate dwelling for each family, and the 38 dwellings are scattered throughout 104 square miles of territory or close to three square miles for every family. There is no lack of elbow-room for family life in this farm area.

On an average these dwellings are thirty years old; nearly half of them have faced the elements for a quarter century or more. Only four have

been built within the last four years. How can farm owners with a gross money income averaging $629 a year build new tenant houses or keep the old houses in proper repair?

Nor is there any lack of elbow space within the tenant dwellings. There are 164 rooms and 147 beds for the 178 occupants. The bed rooms number 124 or more than three per household on an average. Of one-room shacks there are none, and of two-room shanties only four. Eleven dwellings have four rooms each, and fifteen contain from five to six rooms each. These last were the homes of farm owners in by-gone days, now abandoned to tenants. The crowding of humans as in city tenements is a thing unknown in the country regions of the South. Parlors are rare-there are only two in all the thirty-eight dwellings. There are no separate sitting rooms. Bed rooms and sitting rooms are one and the same, and kitchens are invariably used as dining rooms. Only seven of the dwellings are ceiled or plastered, only ten are painted or whitewashed, and only thirteen evidence care on part of the occupants.

But there are signs of family pride and aspirations here and there. One tenant has a washing machine, two have automobiles, two have refrigerators, three have telephones, four have organs, four have victrolas and three have other musical instruments, five have rugs on the floors, nine live in dwellings wholly screened and seven in dwellings partly screened, nine have grass plots about their houses, thirty-one have flower beds, and thirty-five have sewing machines. But in the main, comforts, luxuries and conveniences are sadly lacking in these households-how could they be provided on cash incomes averaging fourteen cents a day per family member?

3. Health Conditions. None of the thirty-eight families have running water in their dwellings, thirty-five have wells, all of them over twenty feet deep; ten of these are open and twenty-four are closed; twenty are under the kitchen or the porches or in the yard within thirty feet of the house. Three of the families must bring the daily water supply in oft repeated trips up-hill from springs.

Only eight families have out-door closets, and these are all used by both sexes. None of the out-houses are fly-proof or water-tight, all are open to the poultry and pigs, none are ever cleaned, and three of them are drained toward the water supply. The bushes and the barn lot buildings are the screens of family privacy for thirty homes. Soil pollution by bodywaste is the rule here as elsewhere throughout the country regions of the United States.* Kitchen waste in all the dwellings is fed to the hogs in the nearby pens, and on six lots the pens are drained toward the water supply.

A doctor's office is on an average of eight miles away from the homes of these thirty-eight farm tenants. And so only seventeen families called in physicians during the year. Five others called on the doctor in his office. The total paid by twenty-two families to the doctors in fees and to

* Rural Sanitation-Public Health Bulletin No. 94, U. S. Public Health Service, Washington, D. C.