Let us consider these possibilities. First it is certain that so far as the Negroes are land holders, and so far as they belong to a self-employing, self-supplying group economy, no possible competition from without can disturb them. I have shown already how rapidly this system is growing. Further than that, there is a large group of Negroes who have already gained an assured place in the national economy as artisans, servants, and laborers. The worst of these may be supplanted, but the best could not be unless there came a sudden unprecedented and improbable influx of skilled foreign labor. A slow infiltration of foreigners cannot displace the better class of Negro workers; simply because the growing labor demand of the South cannot spare them. If then it is to be merely a matter of ability to work, the result of immigration will on the whole be beneficial and will differentiate the good Negro workman from the careless and indifferent.
But one element remains to be considered, and this is political power. If the black workman is to remain disfranchised while the white native and immigrant not only has the economic defense of the ballot, but the power to use it so as to hem in the Negro competitor, cow and humiliate him and force him to a lower plane, then the Negro will suffer from immigration.
It is becoming distinctly obvious to Negroes that to-day, in modern economic organization, the one thing that is giving the workman a chance is intelligence and political power, and that it is utterly impossible for a moment to suppose that the Negro in the South is going to hold his own in the new competition with immigrants if, on the one hand, the immigrant has access to the best schools of the community and has equal political power with other men to defend his rights and to assert his wishes, while, on the other hand, his black competitor is not only weighed down by past degradation, but has few or no schools and is disfranchised.
The question then as to what will happen in the South when immigration comes, is a very simple question. If the Negro is kept disfranchised and ignorant and if the new foreign immigrants are allowed access to the schools and given votes as they undoubtedly will be, then there can ensue only accentuated race hatred, the spread of poverty and disease among Negroes, the increase of crime, and the gradual murder of the eight millions of black men who live in the South except in so far as they escape North and bring their problems there as thousands will.
If on the contrary, with the coming of the immigrants to the South, there is given to the Negro equal educational opportunity and the chance to cast his vote like a man and be counted as a man in the councils of the county, city, state and nation, then there will ensue that competition between men in the industrial world which, if it is not altogether just, is at least better than slavery and serfdom.
There of course could be strong argument that the nation owes the Negro something better than harsh industrial competition just after slavery, but the Negro does not ask the payment of debts that are dead. He is perfectly willing to come into competition with immigrants from any part of the world, to welcome them as human beings and as fellows in the struggle for life, to struggle with them and for them and for a greater South and a better nation. But the black man certainly has a right to ask, when he starts into this race, that he be allowed to start with hands untied and brain unclouded (see Note 17).
Such in bare outline is the economic history of the South. It is the story of an attempt to degrade working men. It failed in 1860, after it had sought for centuries to reduce laborers to the level of purchasable cattle; it failed in 1870, after a fearful catastrophe while endeavoring to revive this system under another name; it has failed since then satisfactorily to maintain the present rural serfdom or to establish a disfranchised caste of artisans; and it will fail in the future to keep the stubbornly up-struggling masses of black laborers down, by shackling their souls and loading immigrants atop of them. It will always fail unless indeed, as sometimes seems possible, both Church and State in America shall refuse longer to listen to the teaching of Jesus when He said: "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
"Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest for your souls.
"For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."