Bonaparte.
I showed Bonaparte what I had discovered, and he seemed terribly shocked. Whether this was real or not I cannot say, but it seemed very real, and as he has never ploughed, perhaps he really did not understand. When I said:
"And this is why the wage rice turned out so badly! You received ploughing like this and I paid for it," he seemed convicted and humbled. He had told me how beautifully the rice got up, but as soon as the hot suns of July struck it, the leaves just wilted. Of course, the roots could not penetrate the packed, unbroken clay soil. The best rice-field soil is a blue clay which the sun bakes like a brick. For a while the roots lived in the fresh earth on top.
The seed rice I had paid $1.35 a bushel for and planted two and one-half bushels to each acre; the cost of cultivating and harvesting it is $15 the acre, so that makes $18.37 which it cost to produce seventeen bushels of rice, which sold at 80 cents a bushel, $13.60.
What is to be the result of this new departure in the way of dishonesty I do not know. It has taken me a long time to lose patience. A few years ago one could get the value of the money paid for work. Just after the war there was a splendid body of workers on this plantation, and every one in the neighborhood was eager to get some of the hands from here. My father gave prizes for the best workers in the different processes, and they felt a great pride in being the prize ploughman or ditcher or hoe hand of the year; but now, alas, poor things, they have been so confused and muddled by the mistaken ideas and standards held out to them that they have no pride in honest work, no pride in anything but to wear fine clothes and get ahead of the man who employs them to do a job.
It is very hard for me to say this; I have labored so among them to try to elevate their ideals, to make them bring up their children to be honest and diligent, to make them still feel that honest, good work is something to be proud of. Even last year I would not have said this, but, alas, I have to say it now.
I have just come in from the corn-field, where two women have been paid for cutting down the corn-stalks, so that there will be nothing to interfere with the plough. They have only broken off the tops of the stalks, leaving about eighteen inches of stout corn-stalks all through the field. I shall have to send some one else to do the work and pay once more.
Yesterday I drove eight miles to my lower place, Casa Bianca, where the foreman asked me to go round the banks with him and see the inroads of the last full-moon tides, and it was appalling, the forces of nature are so immense. It makes me quail to think of the necessity of setting my small human powers in opposition. The rice-field banks are about three feet above the level of the river at high water, and each field has a very small flood-gate (called a trunk), which opens and closes to let the water in and out; but when a gale or freshet comes, all the trunk doors have to be raised so as not to strain the banks, and the water in the fields rises to the level of the river outside.