e who follow him and depend upon him for a supply of
material. In the smaller factories the work is regarded somewhat in the
light of a summer holiday, as the tasks are simple and the operatives
talk and sing at their work. This social element largely disappears,
however, with the introduction of machinery. As might be expected in a
labor force composed of men, women, and children, both white and black,
with some engaged in manual labor and others tending complicated
machines, there is little solidarity. An organized strike including any
large percentage of the force in a tobacco factory is a practical
impossibility. Those engaged in a particular process may strike and in
consequence tie up the processes depending upon them, but any sort of
industrial friction is uncommon. The general level of wages has been
steadily rising, and among the negroes the tobacco workers are the
aristocrats of the wage earners and are content with their situation. Since
the larger factories are almost invariably in the cities, the homes of the
workers are scattered and not collected in communities as around the cotton
mills.

Experiments have been made in employing negro operatives in the textile
industry, so far with little success, though the capacity of the negro
for such employment has not yet been disproved. Though several cotton
mills which made the experiment failed, in every case there were
difficulties which might have caused a similar failure even with white
operatives. Negroes have been employed successfully in some hosiery
mills and in a few small silk mills. The increasing scarcity of labor,
especially during the Great War, has led to the substitution of negroes
for whites in a number of knitting mills. Some successful establishments
are conducted with negro labor but the labor force is either all white
or all black except that white overseers are always, or nearly always
employed.

An important hindrance in the way of the success of negroes in these
occupations is their characteristic dislike of regularity and punctuality.
As the negro has acquired these virtues to some extent at least in the
tobacco industry, there seems to be no reason to suppose that in time he
may not succeed also in textiles, in which the work is not more difficult
than in other tasks of which negroes have proved themselves capable. So far
the whites have not resented the occasional introduction of black
operatives into the textile industry. If the negroe