e we any right to
abuse the Negro for moving to the Northern states where he is
tempted by high wages when we are not paying him his worth at
home?... Then, too, the Negro is not being given a square deal in
the matter of education. In a majority of our rural districts
especially the schools for Negro children are miserable
makeshifts, the teacher often more ignorant than the pupils,
little or nothing allowed for their support, and the children
derive no benefits whatever.... The ugly fact remains that we
have not been doing our duty by the Negro, and until we do there
is no reason to hope for a better settlement of our industrial
conditions."[97]

_The Progressive Farmer_, too, another Southern organ, was of this
opinion:

"Farm labor has always commanded smaller wages in the South than
in other parts of the country. In 1910, the average monthly wage
of male farm laborers in the South Atlantic States was only
$18.76, and in the South Central States, $20.27, while in the
North Atlantic and North Central States the average exceeded $30,
and in the Western States reached $44.35.... We ought to face the
competition of other sections, not by taxing and mobbing labor
agents, but by treating our own labor so fairly that it will be
willing to stay with us."[98]

Besides these we have the opinions of two other social agencies that
were also in favor of the remedy of conciliation as a means of
checking the exodus. These are the University Commission on Southern
Race Questions and the Southern Sociological Congress. The former
advocated as a check on the movement the giving to the Negroes a
larger measure of those things which human beings hold dearer than
material goods.[99] In its judgment some of these things were as
follows: fair treatment, opportunity to labor and enjoy the legitimate
fruits of labor, assurance of even-handed justice in the courts, good
educational facilities, sanitary living conditions, tolerance, and
sympathy. At its annual meeting in 1917 the Southern Sociological
Congress expressed the belief that the movement could be stopped, not
by repression, but by cooperation between peoples of both races.[100]
Most of the speakers at this gathering recommended a getting together
of the leaders of the whites and the blacks so that they might discuss
the situation very frankly and thereby work out plans to ensure