is, in the main, vastly more than the slave master got, as the latter was at the expense of housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical service for his chattel, while the former is relieved of this expense and trouble.  Prof.  W.E.B.  DuBois, of Atlanta University, who has made a critical study of the rural Negro of the Southern States, sums up the industrial phase of the matter in the following ("The Souls of Black Folk,” pp. 39-40): 

“For this much all men know:  Despite compromise, war and struggle, the Negro is not free.  In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary.  In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges.  Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis.  Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life.  And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime.”

It is a dark and gloomy picture, the substitution of industrial for chattel slavery, with none of the legal and selfish restraints upon the employer which surrounded and actuated the master.  And this is true of the entire mass of the Afro-American laborers of the Southern States.  Out of the mass have arisen a large number of individuals who own and till their own lands.  This element is very largely recruited every year, and to this source must we look for the gradual undermining of the industrial slavery of the mass of the people.  Here, too, we have a long and tedious process of evolution, but it is nothing new in the history of races circumstanced as the Afro-American people are.  That the Negro is destined, however, to be the landlord and master agriculturist of the Southern States is a probability sustained by all the facts in the situation; not the least of which being the tendency of the poor white class and small farmers to abandon agricultural pursuits for those of the factory and the mine, from which the Negro laborer is excluded, partially in the mine and wholly in the factory.  The development of mine and factory industries in the Southern States in the past two decades has been one of the most remarkable in industrial history.

In the skilled trades, at the close of the War of the Rebellion, most of the work was done by Negroes educated as artisans in the hard school of slavery, but there has been a steady decline in the number of such laborers, not because of lack of skill, but because trade unionism has gradually taken possession of such employments in the South, and will not allow the Negro to work alongside of the white man.  And this is the rule of the trade unions in all parts of the country.  It is to be hoped that there may be a gradual broadening