the economic struggle for existence:

I am, I believe, a typical Southern white workingman of the skilled variety, and I’ll tell the whole world, including Drs. Abbott and Eliot, that I don’t want any educated property-owning Negro around me. The Negro would be desirable to me for what I could get out of him in the way of labour that I don’t want to have to perform myself, and I have no other uses for him.

Who Will Do the Dirty Work?

One illustration more and I am through. I met at Montgomery, Alabama, a lawyer named Gustav Frederick Mertins. We were discussing the “problem,” and Mr. Mertins finally made a striking remark, not at all expressing the view that I heard from some of the strongest citizens of Montgomery, but excellently voicing the position of many Southerners.

“It’s a question,” he said, “who will do the dirty work. In this country the white man won’t: the Negro must. There’s got to be a mudsill somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won’t stay where they belong; and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others discontented.”

Mr. Mertins presented me with a copy of his novel called “The Storm Signal,” in which he further develops the idea (p. 342):

The Negro is the mudsill of the social and industrial South to-day. Upon his labour in the field, in the forest, and in the mine, the whole structure rests. Slip the mudsill out and the system must be reorganised.... Educate him and he quits the field. Instruct him in the trades and sciences[Pg 86] and he enters into active competition with the white man in what are called the higher planes of life. That competition brings on friction, and that friction in the end means the Negroe’s undoing.

[Pg 86]

Is not this mudsill stirring to-day, and is not that the deep reason for many of the troubles in the South—and in the North as well, where the Negro has appeared in large numbers? The friction of competition has arrived, and despite the demand for justice by many of the best class of the Southern whites, the struggle is certainly of growing intensity.

And out of this economic struggle of whites and blacks grows an ethical struggle far more significant. It is the struggle of the white man with himself. How shall he, who is supreme in the South as in the North, treat the Negro? That is the real struggle!

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