ial
position is better or worse than it was, say, at the close of the
Reconstruction period. As a mass, I am inclined to the opinion that it is
worse, as the laws of the States where he is congregated most numerously
are so framed as to favor the employer in every instance, and he does not
scruple to get all out of the industrial slave that he can; which 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 clas