If Dr.Tucker will glance at the great increase of the cotton, tobacco, and sugar crops South, as shown in Agricultural Reports from 1865 to 1882, and reflect that NEGROES have been the producers of these crops, he will understand their indignation at his outrageous charges of "laziness and vagabondage:" and perhaps he will listen to their demand that he shall take back the unjust and injurious imputations which, without knowledge and discrimination, he makes against a whole race of people.
This impulse to thrift on the part of the Freedmen was no tardy and reluctant disposition.

It was the _immediate_ offspring of freedom.
It is not possible even to approximate the landed acquisitions of the colored people, but that they have been large purchasers of small holdings will readily be admitted by all candid persons who are acquainted with the intense pastoral nature of the people, their constant thrift, and their deepseated determination to own their own homes.

If we assume, with Dr.Crummell, that in the past seventeen years, the hardest, most disadvantageous years they will ever again be compelled to go through, they have come into possession of 5,600,000 acres, the gain in the next seventeen years must be vastly greater.

At any rate, we are free to place the holdings in the next fifty years at not less than 35,000,000 acres, and the probability is that it will be vastly more.
In the _Popular Science Monthly_ for October 1881, Mr.J.Stahl Patterson, in an article on the "Movement of the Colored Population," says: "It would seem that in the industrial aspects of the case the white and colored men may be, under certain circumstances, the complement of each other." Again: "There are two distinct classes of colored economists.

One is satisfied with dependence on others for employment, the other affects independent homes, and struggles to secure them, however humble.