conditions is sure to arise among the colored people, and this because of their growth and of the existence of the hard and fast lines within which this growth must go on. For this kind of discontent the South has no vent such as free institutions provide. Its caste system sits upon this safety valve of democracy. Much of the crime committed by oppressed peoples is in the nature of fullness of life seeking greater freedom, of pent up energies seeking an outlet, and much of the crime committed by oppressors is in the nature of attempts, perilous always, to sit upon this safety valve of popular governments, which is intended to relieve dangerous pressure within the steam-chest of human expansion and progress. But the South is determined to keep the Negro down however great may be his effort to rise. He is to be kept down by brute force if he cannot be kept down in any other way, below the social and industrial and political level of the lowest and most worthless of the whites, because he is black and because they are white.

This is the meaning of the Southern movement for segregating the races, of its jim-crow car laws and waiting-rooms. This is the meaning of the Negro’s exclusion from dining-cars and from restaurants along the line of Southern railroads. He pays the same fare as the white passenger but he is given inferior accommodations and in many instances these accommodations are monstrously unequal and inferior. He is black and therefore the same law which protects the white passenger against bad accommodations does not apply to him. He is at the mercy of railroads, which may treat him as badly as they choose, and there is none to say them nay. Why? Because all these iniquitous distinctions and discriminations serve to teach colored men and women, however intelligent and wealthy and respectable, that their intelligence and wealth and respectability do not entitle them to equal treatment with the most vicious and worthless of the whites. At the moral retchings and manly revolt of the victim against this unequal treatment the South either sneers or else grows angry, because it affects to see in them the Negro’s ambition for social equality, his secret desire to leave his class and to enter that of the whites and to marry white women. And so down on the safety valve which free institutions provide, and regardless of the steam pressure within, the South has planted its brutal might with reckless and insolent disregard of consequences.

Everywhere the treatment of the Negro is the same, and everywhere the purpose of the South is plain. What with its contract labor laws and emigration laws and vagrancy laws and convict-lease and plantation-lease and credit systems the South is working mightily, night and day, to reduce the Negro laborer to wage slavery, to fix him in an industrial position where he shall have no rights which the white employer class is bound to respect. Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward or protection against the rapacity of Southern employers. What it gets as its share bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share. The employer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence. I am speaking of course broadly, for there are many Negroes who get more than a bare subsistence out of the products of their labor, and that in spite of bad and unequal laws and conditions. But the great mass of Negro agricultural labor is exploited and plundered by the white employer class, and kept poor, because being poor they are esteemed less capable of giving the South trouble. It is the only labor class in the South that is deprived of the right to vote, and so is rendered powerless to influence legislation and administration and the courts in its favor. If the poverty of Negro labor renders it as a class less capable of giving the employer class trouble this poverty is at the same time a crime breeder and a huge crime breeder into the bargain.

Take this case which has just been decided favorably for