Since most country districts are without sanitary closets, reinfection may occur again and again, until an individual harbors a host of these tiny bloodsuckers, which interfere with his digestion and sap his vitality.
It is now believed that the morbid appetites of the "clay eaters" are due to this infection.

The fact that the negro who introduced the curse is less susceptible to the infection and is less affected by it than the white man is one of life's ironies.
There is a brighter side to this picture, however.

Of all the cultivated land in the South 65 per cent is worked by owners (white 60.6 per cent; colored 4.4 per cent) and this land is on the whole much better tilled than that let to tenants.

It is true that some of the landowners are chronically in debt, burdened with mortgages and with advances for supplies.

Some of them probably produce less to the acre than tenants working under close supervision, but the percentage of farms mortgaged is less in the South than in any other part of the country except the Mountain Division, and unofficial testimony indicates that few farms are lost through foreclosure.
For years the agricultural colleges and the experiment stations offered good advice to the Southern farmer, but they reached only a small proportion.