negro can make himself of such indispensable service to his neighbor and the community that no one can fill his place better in the body politic. There is at present no other safe course for the black man to

pursue. As it is, if he enjoys any monopoly of labour at all, it is confined to the lower, less exacting, and therefore less remunerative, forms of labour. The negro can plant and hoe and plough and pick the cotton and take it to the gin, but when he tries to follow the bale into the mill he is unable to measure up to the standard of skill required for this work. Likewise he may fell the tree or dig out the iron ore, but in the factory these same products pass into more skilful hands.2

Even as tiller of the soil and labour supply there is evidence of a growing feeling in sections of the South that much of the agricultural unprogressiveness of that region is due to the negro's inefficiency. This finds expression in the following language of a southern editor. "The ignorant negro in the South to-day is a great economic burden and as a rule states and communities are prospering in proportion to their white population. I do not know what we are going to do with the negro. I do know that we must either frame a scheme of education and training that will

1 The Future of the American Negro, p. 216.

2 B. T. Washington, op. cit., pp. 62 ff.

keep him from dragging down the whole level of life in the South, that will make him more efficient, a prosperity maker and not a poverty breeder or else he will leave our farms and give way to the white immigrant." The attempt has already been made to substitute Italian labour for that of the negroes on the plantations of the far South.2

There is much to indicate that, when the industrial quickening of the South, now seen in the increase of mills and factories, shall have reached the farm, the negro will again have to face the demand for higher efficiency which he failed to meet in the cities of the North. We have every reason to believe that this economic struggle will decide to a very large extent the fate of the masses of the negro in this country. Booker Washington's forecast of the future is very different from that of Frederick Douglas, and it is undoubtedly much nearer the truth when he says, "it is most important that the negro and his white friends honestly face the facts as they are; otherwise the time will not be very far distant when the negro of the South will be crowded to the ragged edge of industrial life as he is in the North." This is cor

1 Clarence H. Poe, editor of The Progressive Farmer, Raleigh, North Carolina, writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. XXXV, p. 45.

2 Stone, op. cit., pp. 180 ff., gives a description of the experiment in Arkansas.

3

3 Op. cit., p. 79.

roborated by Professor Kelsey in the conclusions reached in his valuable monograph, The Negro Farmer, p. 69: "If the indications point, as many believe, toward the South as the seat of the next great agricultural development, these questions become of vital importance to the Negro. Can he become economically secure before he is made to meet a competition which he has never yet faced? Or does the warmer climate give him an advantage, which the whites cannot overcome? I must confess that I doubt it." To be "crowded to the ragged edge of industrial life" will mean finally to be crowded to the edge of society in general and the logical outcome of such a situation is obvious, namely, social elimination.

Our conclusions from the discussion of this, perhaps the most important factor in determining the future of the negro, are, first, that any overhasty attempts on his part to grasp the most coveted prizes of the civilisation that environs him before he has assured for himself a fixed and permanent place in the industrial order must end in failure. They will fail because ours is an industrial civilisation and becoming even more so. In it all rights and privileges are won rather than received as free gifts, and social emoluments are determined largely by social worth. The negro has yet to learn the basic principle of all social progress,

namely, that the comprehension of the social heritage and its proper exploitation must depend ultimately upon living one's self into a sympathetic understanding of it through creative individual activity. Finally, in an intense and strenuous civilisation such as ours not only the rewards and the privileges of the community, but ultimately the very social survival of a group will depend upon the extent to which it succeeds in making for itself a safe and sure place in the social order through its own proven worth. This will be especially true of the negro because he is an alien race and because of the disastrous results in the past of admitting him to places of power and privilege which he had not earned and for which he was unfitted.

CHAPTER V

RACE-PREJUDICE

A SEPARATE chapter must be devoted to that factor which is generally thought to be the chief hindrance to the negro's successful assimilation of his social heritage, namely, race-prejudice. The immediate effect of race-prejudice is to set the negro off in a separate group. This segregation is often as irrational, apparently, as the primitive taboo. No distinction is drawn between the intelligent and the ignorant, the upright and the criminal, the efficient and the inefficient. The coloured man is thrown back upon his own group and necessarily his outlook for promotion and the enjoyment of social emoluments is limited to what his own people alone can offer him. This does not amount to complete starvation of the social self, as some negro writers so bitterly complain, but it does mean serious restriction of the negro in his effort to appropriate the best that his social inheritance can offer him.

The negro artisan, for example, realises that increased efficiency on his part will not always insure promotion, as is usually the case with his white com

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