ng, plumbing, the hundred mechanical
trades,--these, for the most part, are shut to him; so are clerkships;
so are nineteen-twentieths of the ways by which the white boys he plays
and studies with to-day can win competence and comfort and serve the
community. It is a wrong to whose acuteness we are blunted by
familiarity. It can be changed only as sentiment is changed; and for
that there must be white laboring men who will bravely go ahead and
break the cruel rule by welcoming the black laborer to their side.

In the South the negro as yet enjoys industrial freedom, in the choice
of an occupation--or a near approach to it--because his labor is so
necessary that he cannot be shut out. But the walls are beginning to
narrow. White immigration is coming in. The industrial training of the
old plantation is no longer given, and industrial schools are yet very
imperfectly developed. Some trades are being lost to the negroes; they
have fewer carpenters, masons, and the like; they find no employment in
cotton mills, and are engaged only in the least skilful parts of iron
manufacture. The trade unions, gradually spreading through the South,
begin to draw back from their early professions of the equality and
brotherhood of all toilers. An instance comes to hand as these pages are
being written--one instance out of a plenty. "The convention at Detroit,
Mich., of the amalgamated association of steel and iron workers has
postponed for a year consideration of a proposition to organize the
colored iron, steel and tin workers of the South. The white employes of
the Southern mills led the opposition. They objected to seeing the
negroes placed on an equality, and it was further argued that once a
colored man obtained a standing in the association, there was nothing to
prevent his coming North. President Shaffer urged that all men who are
competent workers should be members of the association." Now for next
year it is up to President Shaffer, and those of like mind! On this
question, of comradeship between black and white laborers, there is a
call to the leaders of labor organizations to lead right. These chiefs
of labor hold a place of the highest possibilities and obligations. In
their hands largely lies the advance or retrogression of the industrial
community--and that means our entire community. It is one of the most
hopeful signs of the times that stress of necessity is bringing to
labor's front rank men of a higher type, men often of