which have given certain new and malignant features to the relations between black and white in America. The effect upon the free laborers of the sudden influx of black competitors in the labor-market; the consequent attitude of the labor-unions; the political and social reflex of all this, with the vestiges of the old, re-developing under the new conditions—all these are parts of the problem. But space will not permit, and these considerations will be taken up in a second paper. Yet I may indicate here the gist of my conclusions by quoting the words of a well-known Southerner, the Rev. Quincy Ewing. “The race problem—is not that the Negro is what he is in relation to the white man—the white man’s inferior—but this, rather: How to keep him what he is in relation to the white man; how to prevent his ever achieving or becoming that which would justify the belief on his part, or on the part of other people, that he and the white man stand on common human ground.”

[40]

America

The economic necessities of a system of vicarious production led to the creation of a racial labor-caste; the social adjustment consequent upon this and upon its development created a social sentiment inimical to this class, and its continuance requires a continuance of this sentiment in our society; this is the pivotal fact. And the unavoidable conclusion is, that when this system of vicarious production disappears, the problem which is its consequence will disappear also—and not till then, in spite of all the culture, individual or collective, which that class may achieve.

[41]

 ON A CERTAIN CONSERVATISM IN NEGROES 

It would be a difficult task to name one line of intellectual endeavor among white men in America, in which the American Negro has not taken his part. Yet it is a striking fact that the racial attitude has been dominantly conservative. Radicalism does not yet register to any noticeable extent the contributions of our race in this country. In theological criticism, religious dissent, social and political heresies such as Single Tax, Socialism, Anarchism—in most of the movements arising from the reconstruction made necessary by the great body of that new knowledge which the last two centuries gave us—the Negro in America has taken no part. And today our sociologists and economists still restrict themselves to the compilation of tables of statistics in proof of Negro progress. Our scholars are still expressing the intellectual viewpoints of the eighteenth century. The glimmer of a change is 

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