rking population were engaged in
domestic service. Limited to a few occupations, the negroes naturally
encountered there intense competition with the usual result of low
wages and numerous other abuses. Whenever they entered new fields,
as for instance those designated by the census as trade and
transportation, they were generally compelled to accept wages below
the standard to obtain such employment.

There appears to have been a slow but steady progress throughout the
North toward the accession of negroes to new lines of occupation. This
change was forced, unquestionably, by the necessity for seeking new
fields even at an economic loss. From the lines of work in which
negroes for a long time have held unquestioned prestige, the
competition of other nationalities has removed them. It is difficult
now to find a barber shop operated by a negro in the business district
of any northern city. The most dangerous competitor of the negro in
northern industry has been the immigrant, who, unconscious of his
subtle inhibition on the negro's industrial development, crowded him
out of employment in the North and fairly well succeeded in holding
him in the South. After fifty years of European immigration the
foreign born increased from two million to over thirteen million and
only five per cent of them have settled in the South. Indeed, the
yearly increase in foreign immigration equalled the entire negro
population of the North.

The competition in the North has, therefore, been in consequence
bitter and unrelenting. Swedes and Germans have replaced negroes in
some cities as janitors. Austrians, Frenchmen and Germans have
ousted them from the hotels, and Greeks have almost monopolized the
bootblacking business. The decline in the domestic service quota of
the working negro population, when there has been a decline, seems to
have been forced. The figures of the United States census strengthen
the belief that the World War has accomplished one of two things: It
has either hastened the process of opening up larger fields or it
has prevented a serious economic situation which doubtless would
have followed the complete supplanting of negroes by foreigners in
practically all lines.

Before the war the immigration of foreigners from Europe was
proceeding at the enormous rate of over a million a year. This influx
was so completely checked by the war that the margin of arrivals
over departures for the first three years following the begi