being allowed to draw their balance over this store account once a month. And as in the towns, the prices at the commissary, or company store, were highly exorbitant, and the workmen were always tempted to run up large accounts. In fact, practically all the lumber companies that made any profit at all, made it out of their stores, -'operating on a commissary basis,' as it is called, with results to the workmen that may be imagined. To change this custom was by other lumbermen looked on as suicidal.

But the Vateria Company began at once the payment of its workmen once a week in cash. It is hard to make clear the miracle that this one simple fact works, and has worked here, in the conduct of a man's life, and in his moral attitude. It might be said that this is a commonplace business method, a matter of course. Unfortunately it was, and is, so little a matter of course in the South that the country's whole economic condition would have been changed, if fifteen years ago the credit system could have been swept away everywhere and cash payments inaugurated. A large number of immigrants brought with great hopes to South Carolina in 1906, left there within a year largely because they were not paid in cash and had to trade at the company store. And to-day, still, the camp, mine and plantation hands, the tenant farmers and the small freehold farmers, are nearly all fast-bound, each under the special conditions of his calling, in this cruel system of indefinite credits and inordinate payments. But by this first act of economic justice on the part of the Vateria owners, the first condition of independent and self-controlled living was given, to which the others were but corollaries. All the incentives to steady and thrifty living, to self-control and self-respect, were thus supplied to the workman: family life and responsi

bility, the opportunity for civic duty, education, and the basic condition of all, control of the product of his labor.

It was this same financial freedom which in Vateria itself gave an early firm foundation for its healthy and enterprising growth. With liberal weekly wages in hand, the mill-workers could trade where they would. The result was that merchants and storekeepers of all kinds came to set up in the town; a healthy competition was induced, which kept prices reasonable, so that the country trade came in from all about. The thus augmented stream of ready cash attracted banks, and the deposits made new enterprises possible through loans. Thus simple commonsense fairness in paying off laborers became a very great factor in the building up of an active town.

To this day many lumber companies are 'operating on a commissary basis.' If, however, they tell of the reckless improvidence of their mill and camp operators, it is easy to impute the responsibility; Vateria has demonstrated the results of the other method.

Thus, drawn by steady employment and prompt payment, the best workmen were available. Much at variance with the usual outlook, the main reliance of the Vateria Company, both mill and camp, was to be on the country people. These were at first reluctant. They had the usual view of 'lumber-jacks'; they were of pure American stock, used to farming only; poor and proud, and, at first, indolent. But if a man has a stake in the country in property and family relations he is fixed, steadied, and speeded. The Vateria Company encouraged in every way the ownership of land and the building of homes by its men. Though the legal rate of interest in Mississippi is six per cent, most of the country bankers get their ten and twelve per cent and over; but the lumber company lent money to its

employees at six per cent, and sold plots of ground to them on easy terms.

A tremendous inducement to superior workmen is an opportunity to educate their children. Now the success of the lumber mill, the shops, and the various subsidiary enterprises of Vateria, soon made it possible to spend town money for schools. In this one field all the influence that the company could bring to bear was openly exerted. It was augmented by this time by a large group of energetic young men, friends and relatives of the original pioneer, all of whom lived in the town. This again sounds to Eastern ears like a commonplace, but in truth it is almost unheard of in lumber towns and other such large enterprises in the South. Hardly one but suffers from absentee landlordism. But our Westerner and his associates served on the school-boards, sent their children to the public schools, and fought for them year in and year out, in large and in detail. Other citizens demanded more public buildings, paved streets. 'After we have good schools,' answered the lumbermen. In 1905 the average annual expenditure per pupil in daily attendance in the South was $9.75, in the North about $28.45. In 1900, Mississippi spent but $6.17 per pupil. But the Vateria school budget has been for years $35,000 for a town of 8500 people, or $20 per year per white pupil. The result is that the schools of Vateria are acknowledged the best in the whole state. The good old country stock thereabout, of English and Scotch-Irish descent, has awakened to the opportunity. Family after family moves to town that its children may be educated, and the personal level of the workmen available has been, in consequence of this large material for selection, obviously raised.

The proportion, among the employees, of American country people settled in their own homes, to the nomad

workers, is enormously greater than that in other mill towns and camps. In the town of one great enterprise in this field a teacher of the lowest grade school was asked as to the nationality of her charges. 'All dagoes,' she answered. "They are very quick to learn, but they get little schooling, because their parents never stay any time in the same place.' In the light of these facts, and their significance for the community life, the unpaved streets and homely vistas of Vateria ceased to have a negative æsthetic value. A breath of energy and of hope seemed to blow across them.

stress on

This is, perhaps, the place to speak of what most discussions of Southern industrial conditions seem to lay most the race question as it enters into labor competition. In Vateria, at least, the problem does not obtrude itself; it seems rather to be solved by obvious necessity. The negro cannot work in the cotton mill; he is too clumsy for the delicate operations, and the noise stupefies him. In the camp and the saw-mill he works side by side with white men, and the best man wins.

By far the most important workman in the saw-mill is the sawyer, he who guides the mammoth log on its steamcarriage up to the great endless bandsaw, and directs its cutting, board by board. Good judgment on the part of the sawyer as to how to cut a log to get the most out of it, is the most essential element in the conduct of the mill: as the logs are cut, so is the gain or loss from the whole operation. Yet the best sawyer the Vateria Company ever had was a colored man. For years he drew sawyer's wages, three or four times the ordinary wage of the mill-hand, with no murmurs from the others - his superiority was too obvious. On the other hand, neither in mill nor camp are there negro foremen; they do not ordinarily develop those qualities of character necessary to hold a foreman's job.

In general, race troubles seem to arise where the poorer whites are ignorant and inefficient, and so have some reason to fear competition. In Vateria they are so absolutely the opposite of this; they are, on the contrary, of such fresh and untried stock, responding so quickly to any opportunity for education and self-help, that their comparatively good relations with the large negro population are not hard to understand.

In the building up of the town, however, there are other elements than education and raising the quality of human material. A lumber town that is a lumber town alone has too many of its eggs in one basket. They are just beginning to preach diversified farming in the South, but the energetic spirits of Vateria set to diversifying industry as soon as their lumber company was on its feet. They founded a cotton mill, which has now twenty thousand spindles; they aided the fortunes of a cotton-oil and fertilizer mill; they welcomed the advent of other lumbermen. In the place today there is a brick plant, a wagon factory, a hardwood saw-mill, and a cotton compress (cotton being sold by weight, but shipped by volume). And now, in 1912, a group of business men have secured and largely support the services of a Federal agricultural expert and demonstrator for the country immediately surrounding Vateria probably the first instance of such activity in behalf of the farming neighbors of a single town.

The cotton-mill is of the usual type, save for the small number of children at work. In going through the schools of the cotton-mill quarter, and noting the good appearance of the pupils, it is impossible not to sympathize in some degree with the Southern tolerance of a modicum of youthful labor in mills. It is light labor, with no children under

twelve, and no night work. The cotton operators are originally of a much lower grade than the lumber workers; they come in from farms where the whole family has worked half-starved, in unsanitary conditions. The new-comers are very badly nourished, and have no ideas of orderly living; barely twenty per cent of them can read or write. In the town the whole family still works; but where fair wages and steady employment insure good living, where the company sees to it that they keep proper home conditions, and there is every incentive to education, the children develop well. The second generation of cotton-mill workers is a vast improvement on the first, as observed, at least, in this country town, where the community spirit is so highly developed. As for the cotton-oil mill, the great stoop-shouldered structure makes at least one picturesque corner in the growing town, but color is needed to depict its interior. The cotton seeds, still greenish-white with lint, are led on a high conveyer to the part of the mill where they are to be ground, and there fall from it into a pile - a mountain

the slope of whose sides is repeated in the slant of the covering roof. This gray-green mound, and the shafts of light and depths of shadow in the cavernous spaces of the great mill, make a perfect setting for the negroes at work. In and over everything is the golden oil from the presses and the golden dust from the grinding a rich brown on walls and floors, wonderful amber and green tints on the garments of the workmen; it seems, indeed, to have passed into their veins, so mellow-gleaming are the tawny faces. And not the least of the mill's fascinations is the delicious odor of the steaming meal. It is strange that this, as well as the oil, is not in more general use as food-certainly, to the eye, the nostril, and the palate, it is most agreeable.

But I have dwelt overlong on the various activities involved in the growth of such a community, and must not forget the basic condition of it all. A frontier country must be opened up, and must have capital to develop it. The capital has been given by the success, through good management, of the lumber company, and by the accumulation of money in the town that it drew together; it has been distributed, also, to many small farmers who have been freed from debt by the cash proceeds of their small timber holdings. Secondly, the country has been opened up to farming by the removal of the forest. Such land as that in southern Mississippi is too fertile not to be every inch under cultivation. To the eye the unworked ground is clayey and unpromising; but it responds like magic to intelligent effort. I have seen gardens in Vateria with quite incredible records at the end of two years, during which time the soil has turned to a rich dark loam, capable of anything, from artichokes to gardenias. The climate is much more favorable in every way than in the lower altitude of Louisiana, and when the farmers get to organizing in the fashion of California, this country may be the greatest truck-garden in the United States. But there is not too much enterprise among them, and thoughtful men are not deploring the advent of the cotton-boll weevil. Cotton ought not to be the only crop; and if the backwoodsmen are only forced into diversified farming, it will be a blessing for the countryside.

But it is the lumber operations that have brought the railroads, the traffic, and the market; and a new spirit of energy and responsibility and prosperity. The cut-over land needs but to be fully cleared, to become an agricultural paradise. Only æsthetic sentimentality could still yearn for the lost forest aisles. The forest has died in giving

birth to something more precious than itself.

And what of the æsthetic meaning of Vateria? The town does not lack all outward fairness. It has dignified public buildings. Stately long-leaf pines in its park stand up against the western sky; around them are some charming houses, lovely gardens. But not by these is it æsthetically saved. Nor is material prosperity here to be regarded as compensation for vanished beauty, though it may, indeed, be accepted as such on occasion - no doubt every ugly thriving town might make the claim. And not even does the effective activity of the industrial system give warrant for according it a positive æsthetic quality. There are many smooth-working great industrial machines in which there is no essential distinction between the animate and the inanimate elements. Such industrial machines are just over the æsthetic threshold they have the low-grade unity of the steam-engine and the dynamo. As, in criticism, the highest place is refused to that literature which, however integral in plan and exquisite in workmanship, conspicuously lets go the prime factor in human beings, will and its obligations, as the book which aims to deal with life and yet ignores its essential meaning, fails of great art, so the industrial creation which aims at organic perfection, and yet takes no account of its essential element, human character and its needs, fails in the same way. There is a fatal flaw in that integrity which alone can give it æsthetic value.

Here is the distinction of Vateria. The genius of the pioneer lumberman lay in the way he made every improvement in method subserve the character and training of his workers, and every improvement in character of the workers subserve the organic growth of the enterprise. Vateria is no little Elysium of 'welfare work.' Of such there is