lives mostly in the rural or country districts. Both the North
and the South will admit this fact; the opportunities offered in the
North then must be largely the opportunities such as large cities can
offer, those in the South must be largely such as country districts can
offer.

But before further considering this question let us note for a moment
the opportunities offered in the South and those offered in the North.
It is true that, in the South, the Negro is disfranchised. It is also
true that he suffers many other injustices in that section, but on the
other hand he has a wide field of labor.

First of all he has almost an unlimited opportunity to farm. He is
better adapted to farm work in that section than either the native
white man or the foreigner. He stands the heat better and can do more
work under a burning Southern sun.

In railroad construction the Negro is preferred. The coal of the South
is dug by Negro labor, the iron ore is picked from the bowels of the
earth by his brawny muscles. The Negro finds work at the foundries, the
great pipe furnaces, the rolling mills, car factories and other
industries in the mineral districts. He is eagerly sought for the
sawmills, the turpentine orchard, and in fact for almost every industry
of the South.

Though the white man in the South is beginning to enter the field of
industry, he has not entered to the extent that the Negro's place is, in
the least, in jeopardy. Such are the opportunities offered the Negro in
the South, though he is largely deprived of political and social rights.
These facts are admitted by both the North and the South.

Now what are the opportunities offered him in the North? First of all,
the Negro is a free man in a political sense. He has the same right to
vote that other citizens have and, too, he can vote according to the
dictates of his own conscience.

President Roosevelt in his speech at Tuskegee in 1905, said that the
colored people had opportunities for economic development in the South
that are not offered to them elsewhere.

In the large cities of the North, where the Negro mostly lives, the
chances for good health and the purchase of a home are not so good. The
man with little means, such as the Negro usually is, must live in
either filthy streets or back alleys, where the air is foul and the
environments are permeated with disease germs. For the lack of fresh
air, pure food and proper exercise, his children are mere weakling