ler areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of
the Black Belt.

All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural
clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum
may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is
quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable
Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the
whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like
close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town
and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other.
This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the
close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house,
one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while
at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the
field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One
can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father's
parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to
grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand,
the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white
people do not have the black man's best interests at heart has been
intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the
better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.

Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground
made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic
effort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the
cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too
readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American
can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of making
efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them the requisite
technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem,
however, is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that
these workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They
exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training;
they are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or
careful. If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed
to the verge of exploitation, as