In the white districts, better methods were coming into use, labor was steady, fertilizers were used, and conditions of transportation were improving.

The whites were also encroaching on the Black Belt; they were opening new lands in the Southwest; and within the border of the Black Belt they were bringing Negro labor under some control.

In the South Carolina rice lands, crowds of Irish were imported to do the ditching which the Negroes refused to do and were carried back North when the job was finished.* President Thach of the Alabama Agricultural College has thus described the situation: * The Census of 1880 gave proof of the superiority of the whites in cotton production.

For purposes of comparison the cotton area may be divided into three regions: first, the Black Belt, in which the farmers were black, the soil fertile, the plantations large, the credit evil at its worst, and the yield of cotton per acre the least; second, the white districts, where the soil was the poorest, the farms small, the workers nearly all white, and the yield per acre better than on the fertile Black Belt lands; third, the regions in which the races were nearly equal in numbers or where the whites were in a slight majority, with soil of medium fertility, good methods of agriculture, and, owing to better controlled labor, the best yield.

In ether words, Negroes, fertile soil, and poor crops went together; and on the other hand the whites got better crops on less fertile soil.