Not at all; only I should have deferred those music lessons about twenty-five years. There are numbers of such pianos in thousands of New England homes. But behind the piano in the New England home there are one hundred years of toil, sacrifice, and economy; there is the small manufacturing industry, started several years ago by hand power, now grown into a great business; there is ownership in land, a comfortable home free from debt, and a bank account. In the 'black belt' community where this piano went, four-fifths of the people owned no land, many lived in rented one-room cabins, many were in debt for food supplies, many mortgaged their crops for the food on which to live, and not one had a bank account. Industrial lessons would have awakened in this community a desire for homes, and would have given the people the ability to free themselves from industrial slavery to the extent that most of them would have soon purchased homes. After the home and the necessities of life were supplied would come the piano. One piano lesson in a home of one's own is worth twenty in a rented log cabin." 1

In the life of a group as well as of an individual the treasures of civilisation at its highest levels are interpreted in terms of the accumulated experience of the past. The "apperceptive mass" which the individual

1 The Future of the American Negro, pp. 32-34.

brings to bear in the intellectual assimilation of a new idea or a new experience represents the accumulations of the past, the structural organisations of his mental furniture in terms of past activities. The social background for the profitable assimilation of piano music was lacking in the negro community of the "black belt" described above.

The problem of the social integration of the negro is one of laying a foundation of industrial efficiency to which in time the higher cultural values may be added. This problem of laying a material basis for cultural advancement involves ultimately a great deal more than the betterment of the individual and the group. It may involve also the very survival of the negro himself. To debar the negro because of inefficiency or race-prejudice from activities necessary to the development of the highest type of culture means, of course, that he must be satisfied with occupations which have a narrower social and cultural horizon. This inevitably dooms him to the mediocre and the commonplace. But such a systematic impoverishment of the negro intellectually and morally must in time result in the disheartening of those fitted by natural talents for the best in the social heritage. This would amount to suppressing the chief sources in the race for inspiration, growth, and an outlook upon a larger life. For it is mainly upon this element

that society must depend to reach the light-hearted and unaspiring masses of the negroes whose primrose path is too often beset with the socially disintegrating forces of vice and disease and desperate ignorance.

The prevalence of vice and disease among the masses and the disheartening effect of the closing of the door of hope have, in fact, led some investigators to a thoroughly pessimistic attitude toward the future of the negro in this country. Professor Wilcox, whose thorough acquaintance with negro statistics entitles him to a most respectful hearing, thinks that the deteriorating effect of vice and disease together with "profound discouragement" due to persistent social repression and industrial defeat will ultimately result in the undoing of the race. "The final outcome," he says, "though its realisation may be postponed for centuries, will be, I believe, that the race will follow the fate of the Indians, that the great majority will disappear before the whites, and that the remnant found capable of elevation to the level of the white man's civilisation will ultimately be merged and lost in the lower classes of the whites, leaving almost no trace to mark their former existence." 1

The facts indicate that the fight for an economic foothold upon which depends the negro's entrance

1 The Proceedings of the Conference at Montgomery, Alabama, 1900, on "Race Problems at the South," p. 156.

upon his social heritage and perhaps his survival as a race has already been lost in the North. This has doubtless been due in part to the physical unfitness of the negro for the climate 1 and partly to the swiftness of the pace set in every phase of life. Correspondents for the negro paper, the New York Age, have chronicled the story of the ousting of the negro from the callings of boot-black, barber, waiter, janitor, caterer, stevedore, and newsvender by the Italian, Greek, German, and Swiss in northern cities.2

This is to be attributed not primarily to race-prejudice, but to inefficiency. "In New York," says Miss Ovington, "the untrained negroes not only form a very large class, but coming in contact, as they do, with foreigners who for generations have been forced to severe, unremitting toil, they suffer by comparison. Contrast the intensive cultivation of Italy or Switzerland with the farms of Georgia or Alabama, or the hotels of France with those of Virginia, and you will see the disadvantages from which the negro suffers. In New York these men are driven at a pace that at the outset distracts the colored man who prefers his leisurely way. Moreover, the foreign workmen have

1 Hoffman states that in New England the negro would die out but for recruits from the South. Race, Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, p. 36.

2 Stone, The American Race Problem, pp. 154 ff., for citations.

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learned persistence; they are punctual and appear every morning at their tasks." Booker Washington recognises the inability of the negroes to survive in competition with the foreign populations of the northern cities and urges them to occupy the southern field before competition brings about like conditions there.2

On the occasion of the exodus of southern negroes to Kansas in 1879-1880, and the consequent consternation among southern planters, Frederick Douglas made the boast that only "the naked iron arm of the negro" could prevent the South from becoming a desolate wilderness. For the negro "stands to-day the admitted author of whatever prosperity, beauty and civilisation are now possessed by the South, and the admitted arbiter of her destiny." 3 This statement must be subjected to very serious modifications in the light of industrial developments in the South during the generation that has elapsed since Douglas made this prophecy. Most significant is the uncertainty of negro leaders themselves on the future of the negro at the South. "Almost the whole problem of the negro in the South," says Mr. Washington, "rests upon the fact as to whether the

1 M. W. Ovington, Half a Man, pp. 101, 102.

2 Charities, Oct. 7, 1905, pp. 17, 19, quoted by Stone, op. cit., p. 172. Life and Times, pp. 525, 526.