The landowners wished cheaper labor and, reckless of other
consequences, they imported slaves from Africa to get it. They gained
for themselves and a few generations of their descendants a measure
of comparative ease, but at a frightful cost to our national life--a
cost of which the Civil War now seems to have been merely a first
installment on account rather than a final payment.

Sec. 3. #Economic aspects of the negro problem.# The negro as a wage
earner is found very little outside of the least skilled branches of
a limited range of occupations. Of these the principal ones, as is a
matter of common knowledge, are farm work, domestic service (including
janitor service in stores and factories and work in hotels), and crude
manual outdoor labor. Repeated attempts to operate factories with
a labor force of negroes have proved unsuccessful. In some of the
better-paying occupations in which large numbers of negroes were found
in the North soon after the Civil War, such as barbering, waiting
on table in the best hotels, and skilled manual work, they have been
largely displaced by European immigrants. Negroes are a disturbing and
unwelcome influence in labor organizations, and even when nominally
eligible to membership are in fact rarely accepted. They very
frequently are employed as strike-breakers and this fosters race
antagonism both immediately and permanently.

The negro problem is, from our present outlook, insoluble. The most
laudable of present efforts, that for industrial training, represented
by Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, and the work of Booker T.
Washington, leaves the dire fact of two races side by side and
yet unassimilated socially, politically, and, in large measure,
economically. Two other possibilities, race admixture and caste,
are both so repellent to white American thought, that they cannot be
looked upon as solutions. Segregation in a separate state, or separate
states, is a thorogoing proposal, but is practically impossible.
Finally there is the conceivable, but improbable, event of the
decrease and extinction of the negroes in America, Their relative
number has declined since 1800,[2] but their absolute number still
continues to increase. It seems probable that if European immigration
were to be stopped that a very large migration of negroes from the
South to the North and the West would occur to take places hitherto
filled by unskilled immigrant workers. In the year 1915, following the
check