has been forced into a sounder and stronger economic position. Many negroes are suffering displacement without gaining by the process; but it is a mistake to assume that displacement in itself is always an evidence of industrial defeat.” “The Basis of Ascendancy,” p. 64.

12. “If my own city of Atlanta had offered it to-day the choice between five hundred negro college graduates—forceful, busy, ambitious men of property and self-respect—and five hundred black, cringing vagrants and criminals, the popular vote in favour of the criminals would be simply overwhelming. Why? Because they want negro crime? No, not that they fear negro crime less, but that they fear negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can. But the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 180.

13. According to Mr. W.H. Thomas, a negro writer violently hostile to his race, negroes in the year 1901 owned about $700,000,000, and paid state and municipal taxes of over $3,000,000. This, he reckons, would mean property to the amount of about $90 per head, or a saving of about $2·60 (ten and sixpence) per head per year since emancipation. Mr. Thomas also states that before the war there was in the South a free negro population of a quarter of a million, owning between thirty-five and forty million dollars’ worth of property. “The American Negro,” pp. 39 and 74. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page also points out that some negroes accumulated wealth during the Reconstruction period “by other means than those of honest thrift.” But it is probable that in most cases the money thus gained was not so employed as to constitute a permanent addition to the wealth of the race.

14. See foot-note, p. 171.

15. Mr Booker Washington declares (“The Negro in the South,” p. 73) that “the race has acquired ownership in land that is equal in area to the combined countries of Belgium and Holland.” He does not say how much of it is under mortgage. Elsewhere, Mr. Washington has stated (on the authority of the census of 1900) “that from a penniless population just out of slavery, 372,414 owners of homes have emerged, and of these 255,156 are known to own their homes absolutely free of encumbrance.” See E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,” p. 184. But the negroes were not absolutely “penniless” at the outbreak of the war. See p. 33.

16. But see foot-note, p. 189.

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