re legal and clandestine methods of railway
passenger agents the work has gone forward. Some southern communities
have, therefore, advocated drastic legislation against labor agents, as
was suggested in Louisiana in 1914, when by operation of the Underwood
Tariff Law the Negroes thrown out of employment in the sugar district
migrated to the cotton plantations.[10]

One should not, however, get the impression that the majority of the
Negroes are leaving the South. Eager as these Negroes seem to go, there is
no unanimity of opinion as to whether migration is the best policy. The
sycophant, toady class of Negroes naturally advise the blacks to remain in
the South to serve their white neighbors. The radical protagonists of the
equal-rights-for-all element urge them to come North by all means. Then
there are the thinking Negroes, who are still further divided. Both
divisions of this element have the interests of the race at heart, but
they are unable to agree as to exactly what the blacks should now do.
Thinking that the present war will soon be over and that consequently the
immigration of foreigners into this country will again set in and force
out of employment thousands of Negroes who have migrated to the North,
some of the most representative Negroes are advising their fellows to
remain where they are. The most serious objection to this transplantation
is that it means for the Negroes a loss of land, the rapid acquisition of
which has long been pointed to as the best evidence of the ability of the
blacks to rise in the economic world. So many Negroes who have by dint of
energy purchased small farms yielding an increasing income from year to
year, are now disposing of them at nominal prices to come north to work
for wages. Looking beyond the war, however, and thinking too that the
depopulation of Europe during this upheaval will render immigration from
that quarter for some years an impossibility, other thinkers urge the
Negroes to continue the migration to the North, where the race may be
found in sufficiently large numbers to wield economic and political power.

Great as is the dearth of labor in the South, moreover, the Negro exodus
has not as yet caused such a depression as to unite the whites in inducing
the blacks to remain in that section. In the first place, the South has
not yet felt the worst effects of this economic upheaval as that part of
the country has been unusually aided by the millions which the United