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25th  Is their condition with respect to the comforts of life better or worse than formerly. 
Answr.  I do not think they are any better, and in many instances I think they must be worse, particularly, with those who have wandered from place to place without any regular employment, and those who have congregated in numbers in vacant houses and who are not hired by the month or by the year on any plantation.

26th Would it be profitable to either party to lease a quantity of land to a freedman for a money rent or for a part of the crop to be worked at his own discretion.
Answr. My reply to the last query is pretty well included in my answer to those proceedings I do not think the practice of renting or leasing land is a profitable one in the tobacco growing region of VA on the part of the proprietor. It never has been adopted or followed to much entent in our past history and I do not think it resulted so far as it has heretofore been pursued in any advantage to the owner of the land. The object of the tenant or lessee has generally been to make all he could out of the land for the time, without any regard to its preservation or improvement, and whenever the owner received a fair money or produce rent either the land was usually as much improved and depreciated in value as the compensation was worth, and I think that few f any farms in this part of Va have not been greatly reduced and impoverished under any system of renting or leasing as [[strikethrough]] the practice [[/strikethrough]] heretofore practiced in this part of Va. Indeed the whole policy of planting as as pursued by by every class of agriculturists in Eastern Va. [[strikethrough]] has been [[/strikethrough]] [[?]] since the first settlement of the colony has been to exhaust and impoverish the land by hard cropping and imprecision cultivation [[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] and the general practice has been to wear out and exhaust one tract of land and then buy another to undergo the same ruiness process or to remove to the newer and more fertile regions of the west to carry on the same destructive system they had left behind, and this is the reason that our county exhibits in the man such a desolate and impoverished appearance, and the reason why so many