The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1868-02-08
AGRICULTURAL POLICY.

Because governmental interference with pri-
vate enterprise has usually proved pernicious
in its results, it does not follow that, without
such interference, private enterprise is certain
to be conducted wisely and with success. 1t
is safe to assume that the mass of individuals
in community can manage their various
affairs of business better than a government
can manage those affairs for them. Neverthe-
less they sometimes manage badly. They
sometimes misunderstood their own interests
and fall into calamitous errors.
The Irish famine of 1913 and the Indian
famine of 1865 were calamities which might
have been avoided by the exercise of reason
able providence on the part Of agricultu-
ralists. In the one case, the sub
sistence of q people was staked on
the soundness and abundance of the potato
crop. In the other case, the life of
millions was also made to depend on the
plentifulness of a single yegetable-rice.
The impoverishment and distress among the
agricultural classes in the cotton-growing
States Of the South cannot be wholly charged
to the pernieious legislation of Congress- and
cannot be ascribed exclusively to any causes
over which the sufferers have had no degree
Of control. They were in no small measure
ayoidable, and are therefore in the same mea-
sure the fruits Of agricultural impolicy.
Planters, consulting their hopes rather than
their convictions trusted with fatal implicit
ness to the production of cotton with freed
men labor under bureaucratic auspices. They
neglected to differentiate their operations by
giving due attention to grain and stock, to
fruits and kitchen gardening Having tasted
the bitter consequences of these errors, it is
hardly conceivable that they would be capa-
bic of repeating them the present year. 1t
deyolves upon those who claim independence
in any vocation to show an alacrity to learn
in the school of experience and to apply the
deductions of reason.
While our planters are by no means in
position to disdain advice, we consider that
much of the advice which has been given
them by the press is more calculated to con-
fuse and mislead than to indicate clearly the
way of safety and profit They are advised,
as a class, to try this, that, or the other spe-
cifc. They are warned, as a class to give up
raising cotton and to dispense with freedmen
labor, and are urged to commit themselves in
common to prescribed modes of administer
ing their properties. Our conviction is that
they will do well as a class to reject specifics,
and to avoid binding themselves as a class to
any determinate and infexible policy. Hence,
we take it, the best advice for them at this
moment is that each, after thoroughly scan-
ming the exigencies of the present and the
uncertainties of the future, shall be his own
adviser, raising cotton or not, hiring freed
men or not accordingly as to do so may or
may not hold out prospect of profit in his
par ticular case. If they adopt this rule in con-
sidering the terms upon which the government
offers them supplies for freedmen laborers,
they will be in no danger, as a class, of in
volvipg themselves in an embarrassing COM
plication under such an arrangement. while
whatever benefits the proposition may have
for certain individuals among them will be
realized.
This scheme of feeding freedmen through
planters who shall hire and be responsible for
their industrial delinquencies is one, as we
have heretofore remarked, in which the gov
eminent proposes to try an experiment which
resulted in signal failure when tried by the
merchants who advanced supplies for a SINH
lar destination last year and the year before.
The only difference is that the government is
more stringent in respect to security; a diff
ference great enough, however, to cause the
experiment to be much less general, mas
much as it will require planters to be much
more circumspect in choosing laborers, and
much more energetic and resolute in obtain
ing from these laborers an adequate amount
of work. 1t is not to be supposed that plant
ers will hypothecate their crops and their
agricultural utensils and stock for the subsist-
ence Of negroes employed by them, without
reasonable assurance of compensation in the
form of productive labor. We may not ex-
pect, therefore, that many freedmen will be
hired on the plan described; but we may ex-
peot that those who are thus hired will be
much moro likely to earn their wages and feed
than such laborers have hitherto been.