Those who left their homes in the South to find new ones in the North thus worked first of all in response to a new economic demand.  Prominent in their thought to urge them on, however, were the generally unsatisfactory conditions in the South from which they had so long suffered and from which all too often there had seemed to be no escape.  As it was, they were sometimes greatly embarrassed in leaving.  In Jacksonville the city council passed an ordinance requiring that agents who wished to recruit labor to be sent out of the state should pay $1,000 for a license or suffer a fine of $600 and spend sixty days in jail.  Macon, Ga., raised the license fee to $25,000.  In Savannah the excitement was intense.  When two trains did not move as it was expected that they would, three hundred Negroes paid their own fares and went North.  Later, when the leaders of the movement could not be found, the police arrested one hundred of the Negroes and sent them to the police barracks, charging them with loitering.  Similar scenes were enacted elsewhere, the South being then as ever unwilling to be deprived of its labor supply.  Meanwhile wages for some men in such an industrial center as Birmingham leaped to $9 and $10 a day.  All told, hardly less than three-fourths of a million Negroes went North within the four years 1915-1918.

Naturally such a great shifting of population did not take place without some inconvenience and hardship.  Among the thousands who changed their place of residence were many ignorant and improvident persons; but sometimes it was the most skilled artisans and the most substantial owners of homes in different communities who sold their property and moved away.  In the North they at once met congestion in housing facilities.  In Philadelphia and Pittsburgh this condition became so bad as to demand immediate attention.  In more than one place there were outbreaks in which lives were lost.  In East St. Louis, Ill., all of the social problems raised by the movement were seen in their baldest guise.  The original population of this city had come for the most part from Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  It had long been an important industrial center.  It was also a very rough place, the scene of prize-fights and cock-fights and a haven for escaped prisoners; and there was very close connection between the saloons and politics.  For years the managers of the industrial plants had recruited their labor supply from Ellis Island.  When this failed they turned to the Negroes of the South; and difficulties were aggravated by a series of strikes on the part of the white workers.  By the spring of 1917 not less than ten thousand Negroes had recently arrived in the city, and the housing situation was so acute that these people were more and more being forced into the white localities.  Sometimes Negroes who had recently arrived wandered aimlessly about the streets, where they met the rougher elements of the city; there were frequent fights and