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Updated: May 28, 2025
Both can afford the expense of slave cultivation but sugar can afford it still better than tobacco. The number of negroes, accordingly, is much greater, in proportion to that of whites, in our sugar than in our tobacco colonies. To the slave cultivators of ancient times gradually succeeded a species of farmers, known at present in France by the name of metayers.
The sole advantage of this small class is their freedom to choose their crops, and the increased responsibility which comes through having money transactions. While some of the renters differ little in condition from the metayers, yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and are the ones who eventually become land-owners.
The remainder, or some one hundred and seventy-five thousand, consist chiefly of small proprietors, owning three, four, five and ten acre patches of land, often intersected by other properties, and therefore not adapted for the cultivation of grain: such of the emphyteutas and metayers as are practically free to cultivate what they please make up the remainder of this class.
Here I learned, with regret, that such is not the case. Land, even in the highly-favoured Allier, cannot afford a triple revenue. In the Indre, on the contrary, there is no intermediary between land-owners and metayers, the former even selling small holdings to their labourers as soon as they have saved a little capital. "No; folks are not prosperous hereabouts," said my informant.
The arrangement was not different essentially from the familiar present-day practice of working a farm "on shares." In France and in England the serfs had mostly become hired laborers, tenants, or metayers by the sixteenth century. The obligations of serfdom had proved too galling for the serf and too unprofitable for the lord.
He was talking of Italy a century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty County to-day. And especially is that true to-day which he declares was true in France before the Revolution: "The metayers are considered as little better than menial servants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the will of the landlords."
But the truth is that the métayer was not a free tenant in the sense which we attach to the word. 'In Limousin, says Arthur Young, 'the métayers are considered as little better than menial servants. And it is not going beyond the evidence to say that they were even something lower than menial servants; they were really a kind of serf-caste. They lived in the lowest misery.
They are usually young unmarried persons, some being women; and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or, more seldom, become renters. The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging classes, and form five per cent of the families.
In this case he parceled it out among particular peasants, furnishing each with livestock and a plow and expecting in return a fixed proportion of the crops, which in France usually amounted to one-half. Peasants who made such a bargain were called in France metayers, and in England "stock-and-land lessees."
All social struggle is evidenced by the rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homogeneous population. To-day the following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these Negroes. A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and wage-laborers.
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