ally in response to
its proper stimulus. That stimulus seems to be, in the cases where I
have met it, unrestricted competition of peoples with different
standards of living. Racial animosities and the so-called racial
misunderstandings that grow out of them cannot be explained or argued
away. They can only be affected when there has been a readjustment of
relations and an organization of interests in such a way as to bring
about a larger measure of co-operation and a lesser amount of friction
and conflict. This demands something more than a diplomacy of kind
words. It demands a national policy based on an unflinching examination
of the facts.

2. Conflict and Race Consciousness[216]

The Civil War weakened but did not fully destroy the _modus vivendi_
which slavery had established between the slave and his master. With
emancipation the authority which had formerly been exercised by the
master was transferred to the state, and Washington, D.C., began to
assume in the mind of the freedman the position that formerly had been
occupied by the "big house" on the plantation. The masses of the Negro
people still maintained their habit of dependence, however, and after
the first confusion of the change had passed, life went on, for most of
them, much as it had before the war. As one old farmer explained, the
only difference he could see was that in slavery he "was working for old
Marster and now he was working for himself."

There was one difference between slavery and freedom, nevertheless,
which was very real to the freedman. And this was the liberty to move.
To move from one plantation to another in case he was discontented was
one of the ways in which a freedman was able to realize his freedom and
to make sure that he possessed it. This liberty to move meant a good
deal more to the plantation Negro than one not acquainted with the
situation in the South is likely to understand.

If there had been an abundance of labor in the South; if the situation
had been such that the Negro laborer was seeking the opportunity to
work, or such that the Negro tenant farmers were competing for the
opportunity to get a place on the land, as is so frequently the case in
Europe, the situation would have been fundamentally different from what
it actually was. But the South was, and is today, what Nieboer called a
country of "open," in contradistinction to a country of "closed"
resources. In other words, there is more land in the South than