country on the entire globe presents so wide a diversity of agricultural conditions as France, from the "Land of Mid-Day" with its vineyards to the inclement north with its cereals and beet-fields! Even in cattleraising not the prairies, steppes and pampas, but Normandy, Nivernais and Bourbonnais represent worldwide diversity of conditions.

We are reminded that most of France is cultivated in little farms-ten or twelve acres or medium ones, of from seventy-five to a hundred. Such economic machines as the great American tractors cannot be utilized under such conditions. A large proportion of leased estates are still worked "on shares," so that the tenant is vitally inter

ested to attain a maximum output; and, at seed-time, harvest, or under threat of coming storms, he will work night and day, with his family and permanent employees, to avert serious loss. The ordinary type of daylaborer is not in control of the situation there. Legislation for the factory or workshop, open and busy, perhaps, every week in the year, has no proper application to the farm. To attempt such control would require a whole army of inspectors with voluminous records, and evoke numberless pleas for exemption from the law.

At present, it is asserted, no element of French life is so stable, conservative, and contented as farm labor.

TUDY of recent official (Brazilian) fig

ures proves that the coffee industry is beginning to recover from the effects of the war, says La Revista Economia y Finanzas (Buenos Aires).

The crop of 1919-20 was somewhat short, the total entries at the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Santos (the two chief export foci of the coffee industry in Brazil) being about 6,700,000 sacks of sixty kilograms each (about 132 pounds). This is less than the 1918-19 crop, which was more than 9,172,000 sacks. On the other hand, the 1920-21 crop is better. Up to June 30, 13,816,000 sacks had been delivered in Rio and Santos-nearly double the amount for a similar period the preceding year.

The following interesting table shows the amount of coffee in sixty-kilogram sacks delivered in Rio and Santos for ten years:

table-in which the money valuation is based on contos of paper reis (in Brazil large sums are reckoned in contos of reis, or amounts of 1,000,000 reis-the nominal exchange value being $1080). It will be noted that sales of the last few years, though smaller in volume, have been larger in money terms, which is explained by the depreciation of money purchasing power, caused by war economic conditions.

This notable diminution in exportations has been the immediate consequence of general restriction in consumption provoked by high living costs throughout the world and by the German Government's decision to prohibit the importation of this product in the interest of its trade balance.

Despite the apparently unfavorable market, a speedy increase in exports may be expected soon, owing to the actual scarcity of coffee in European stocks.

The reader will note that figures quoted are based on Rio and Santos stocks only, not taking into account the actual crops harvested, so that only a partial view (chiefly from the export standpoint) is given. The official 1921 figures are not yet available.

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RESIDENT HARDING'S recent address at Birmingham has reawakened interest in the future of the negro race in this country. A citizen of Alabama, Mr. A. S. Van de Graaff, has contributed to the Tuscaloosa News & Times-Gazette article on the redistribution of the race in America. Mr. Van de Graaff has been a careful student of the subject for more than thirty years, and as long ago as 1896 he wrote and published conclusions which have been strikingly verified by movements of the Southern colored population which have since taken place.

To show what were the actual changes in the twenty years between 1890 and 1910, the northward movement of the American negro is clearly indicated in the census

returns:

There are now more blacks in Cincinnati than in Louisville-more in the border States of the North than in the border States of the South. On the northern side of the old line of cleavage

which the Civil War removed, the number of negroes has been increasing through all of fiftysix years, and has had its greatest increase within the last four. On the southern side there has been as steady a decline, at first only relative but later absolute, until in Kentucky there are now fewer negroes than in 1860, and the black percentage of its population has become less than that for the United States as a whole; until also, as is even more significant, the last census has shown the loss of black population in all the four contiguous subjacent States-Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This radical change of trend-this decisive turn toward uniformity in the redistribution of the negroes between North and South under the conditions of freedom-is thus shown to have already operated over wide areas, and it is now being extended over the whole country.

The movement of the blacks out of the South assumed proportions during the World War which have caused the returns of the census of 1920 to be received as a revelation and heralded as sensational by some Northern editors. They should not have been such to any close observer, or student of statistics. The movement has been continuous since the surrender of the armies of the Confederacy, and its expansion was a logical anticipation. But the cumulative influences of

the war and of the boll-weevil invasion have quickened it beyond all expectation. Contrasts are now presented between groups of States, Northern and Southern, even more striking than those between the different regions of the South resulting from the use of the country as the geographical racial unit thirty years ago. Down to 1910 the immigration of the blacks into the North was pretty well confined to the border States from Illinois to New Jersey, and to the city of New York. To this Northern territory in order to equalize area with that of my upland South, I used to add the District of Columbia, the three lower New England States, and the part of New York south of a line drawn from Massachusetts' northwest corner to Pennsylvania's northeast, making up a total of 206,000 square miles, against 210,000. This "Negro Canaan," as I named it, in 1910 held 840,000 blacks whose decennial rate of 21 per cent. compared with one of less than 4 per cent. for the 1,974,000 blacks of the upland South. It contrasted in another way with the western South, an area twice as large, holding only 912,000 negroes.

Even then a more informing comparison-certainly one more readily followed-would have been afforded by adding to the Northern territory the remainder of New York, raising the area to 246,000 square miles, and contrasting with the 227,000 of the five Southern border States, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, with Tennessee and Virginia added. In the Northern group there were 856,000 blacks, with a decennial gain of 147,000; in the Southern 1,891,000, with a decennial loss of 5000; the halfcentury gains were in the Northern 632,000, or 283 per cent.; in the Southern 312,000, or 37 per cent. only. Now, from the returns of the census of 1920 we find in the Northern group 1,236,000 blacks, showing a decennial gain of 380,000, or 44 per cent.; and in the Southern 1,917.000, showing a gain of 26,000, or less than 12 per cent. And if we again extend the comparison back to 1860, as the beginning of the new dispensation, we have in the Northern area an increase of 1,002,000 negroes, or 448 per cent., against one of 538,000, or 40 per cent. only, in the Southern.

A still more striking comparison from the returns of 1920 is that between the seven great States of the North leading in negro population, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, with the District of Columbia added as before, and those six States of the lower South South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana-in which in 1830 there was already that "black population accumulated along the Gulf of Mexico," which De Tocqueville thought "would have a chance of success, if the American Union is dissolved when the struggle between the two races begins."

These were also six of Judge Tourgee's "eight black republics," and for them his anticipation seemed much better grounded than for North Carolina and Virginia, for in 1860 the two races had stood in them on practically even terms, whites outnumbering blacks by only 32,000, whereas in 1880 the blacks outnumbered the whites by 243,000. But while the blacks still led in 1900 by 25,000, in 1910 the whites held a majority of 557,000, and this had grown in 1920 to 1,607,000. This rapid relative gain of the whites

is itself striking enough, but the difference between the rates of growth of the black population in this supposedly most congenial habitat, and that of the widely differing Northern area, is even more so. In the Northern territory of 290,000 square miles in 1860 there were 202,500 negroes; in the Southern of 287,000 square miles, 2,166,000. In 1920 there were in the Northern 1,219,000 negroes, showing a decennial gain of 409,000, or 50 per cent.; in the Southern 4,957,000, showing a decennial loss of 16,000. For the successive twenty-year periods beginning with 1860-80 the rates of increase in the Northern were respectively 112, 55, and 83 per cent.; in the Southern 47, 39, and 11 per cent.

This contrast may be startling, but that the figures are only typical may be seen by comparing the black rates of increase for the three great divisions-North, West, and South-as defined above. For the last three decades, beginning with that ending in 1920, these rates have been in the North, 46, 20, and 25 per cent.; in the West 55, 68, and 12 per cent.; in the South 2, 10, and 17 per cent. For the three twenty-year periods since 1860, beginning with 1900-20, in the North 74, 52, and 124 per cent.; in the West 160, 156, and 165 per cent.; in the South 12, 32, and 42 per

cent.

Mr. Van de Graaff is convinced that in the long run only good can come to both South and North and to whites and blacks alike from the continuance of the migration

movement:

In no State of the North was the percentage of blacks as high as 4 in 1920, and in only six States did it reach 2. With the first turn of the industrial tide the cities and industries of both North and West will again need and bid for negro labor. For the South, answer might well have been made to the Nebraska inquiry by the secretary of the Montgomery Chamber of Commerce, which within six months preceding had raised $100,000, not to bring back any of the 16,000 negroes Montgomery County lost between 1910 and 1920, but to induce the coming of white farmers from North and West. Now, as twentyfive years ago, it is plainly to be seen in agricultural Alabama that progress and prosperity for counties and communities large and small vary in inverse proportion to the relative numbers of their blacks. Wherever the negroes are in the majority there is stagnation and decay. And this holds in other realms than the material. The negro has risen and is to continue to rise in America. But it is none the less true that American standards are to remain white standards, and community standards ought everywhere to be fixed by the whites. If the number of negroes be such that by their mere mass they fix the community standards, these decline; the negroes rise more slowly, if they rise at all; and the whites, who live with them, may themselves sink toward a lower level. This has been always felt, if not declared in words, in the South. The life of its black belts has not been acceptable to the white man-the standards, political, industrial, and other, of the black belts, have been hardly less unsatisfactory to the Southern white man than to the man of the North.

THE

HE fourth anniversary of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia seemed an opportune time for Nikolai Lenine to write an article which appeared in L'Humanite (Paris) for the edification of French communists. On the same 10th day of November, he delivered a speech before the Second Russian Assembly for Political Education, and it may prove interesting to study both efforts together. In the French communist organ, Lenine lays down as the most imperative task of the revolution the destruction of "what survived in Russia of the Middle Ages . . . all that was opposed to every sort of culture and progress,"-chiefly revivals of serfdom and feudalism in government and institutions.

In Moscow, on the same day, the Russian Premier was telling his people that "the chief lack in the work of most of our assemblies is the absence of immediate connection with the practical problems which confront us." The Bolshevist leader outlines for France what has been accomplished, and he harangues the Russians as to what is yet undone. In the New York Times' translation of the French text in L'Humanité on December 4, 1921, Lenine says:

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What, in 1917, were the most important survivals of feudal serfdom? They were racy, the nobility, property ownership, exploitation of the peasant, social inferiority of woman, orthodoxy, oppression of nationalities. Whereas, in all civilized States, the revolutions of a century ago as well as the English Revolution of 1649 -abolished all these medieval survivals merely in a very incomplete way, we' Russians have thoroughly cleaned our Augean stables. In ten weeks, from November 7, 1917, to the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly . . . the ancient edifice of the old social order was demolished by us in a way that could not have been more thorough. Whereas, in Germany, France, and England, lands of a high degree of culture, vestiges of the remote past still survive, nothing remains in Russia of feudalism and servitude. . . .

In Moscow, Lenine calls attention to the sharp change involved in the new economic policy. He and his associates counted, undoubtedly, on gathering by requisition from the peasants their surplus crops and distributing them as bread to the workmen, who, in turn, would employ themselves in communistic production presumably for requisition of their surplus by the peasants, although Lenine says nothing about that phase of it. At any rate, the scheme failed, and the Russian Premier says, "Before they

have thrashed us definitely, let us retreat and construct everything over again, but more solidly." He says, in the speech at Moscow, also printed in full by the Times (New York):

a

The new economic policy means the change from the requisition of the surplus system to an impost; it means in a considerable measure transition to the reëstablishment of capitalismin what measure we do not know. The concessions to foreign capitalists (it is true that as yet we have signed very few of them, especially if we compare them with the proposals that we have made) the leases by private capitalists-these are a direct reëstablishment of capitalism, and this goes to the roots of the new economic policy.

It follows that the abolition of the requisitionof-the-surplus system means for the peasant free trade for the agricultural surplus not taken by the natural tax. And the natural tax takes only a small portion of the products. The peasants constitute a gigantic portion of the whole population, and of the whole economic structure, and thus, on the soil of free trade, capitalism cannot fail to grow.

What Lenine means by "free trade" is not altogether clear, but it would seem to be synonymous with barter. He asks, what will be the economic foundation of the proletariat state, and answers as follows:

In this connection, we must think of the peasants. It is entirely beyond dispute, and evident to all, that in spite of such a tremendous misfortune as this famine, an improvement of the condition of the population has set in as an accompaniment to the change in our ecomonic policy. On the other hand, if capitalism wins, industrial production will grow and the proletariat will grow with it. The capitalists will win, owing to our own policy, and they will create the industrial proletariat, which, thanks to the war and the desperate disorder and ruin, has been declassed, that is to say, it has been knocked out of its rut, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat..

The communist revolution is differentiated from past affairs as a war of the state authority against the bourgeoisie of its own country and against the united bourgeoisie of all countries, and such a war, says Premier Lenine at Moscow, has never been before.

It was not possible for the people to have had experiences in such a war. We must create it for ourselves, and in this experience we can rely only on the consciousness of the workmen and the peasants. Therein lies the keynote and the greatest difficulty of the task.

We must not count on an immediate transition to communism. We must build it up on the selfinterest of the peasant. They tell us that the