the
white dead on the street, but the cunning mob caught the black men
between the factories and their homes, where they knew they were armed
only with their dinner pails. Firemen, policemen, and militiamen stood
with hanging hands or even joined eagerly with the mob.

It was the old world horror come to life again: all that Jews suffered
in Spain and Poland; all that peasants suffered in France, and Indians
in Calcutta; all that aroused human deviltry had accomplished in ages
past they did in East St. Louis, while the rags of six thousand
half-naked black men and women fluttered across the bridges of the calm
Mississippi.

The white South laughed,--it was infinitely funny--the "niggers" who had
gone North to escape slavery and lynching had met the fury of the mob
which they had fled. Delegations rushed North from Mississippi and
Texas, with suspicious timeliness and with great-hearted offers to take
these workers back to a lesser hell. The man from Greensville,
Mississippi, who wanted a thousand got six, because, after all, the end
was not so simple.

No, the end was not simple. On the contrary, the problem raised by East
St. Louis was curiously complex. The ordinary American, tired of the
persistence of "the Negro problem," sees only another anti-Negro mob and
wonders, not when we shall settle this problem, but when we shall be
well rid of it. The student of social things sees another mile-post in
the triumphant march of union labor; he is sorry that blood and rapine
should mark its march,--but, what will you? War is life!

Despite these smug reasonings the bare facts were these: East St. Louis,
a great industrial center, lost 5,000 laborers,--good, honest,
hard-working laborers. It was not the criminals, either black or white,
who were driven from East St. Louis. They are still there. They will
stay there. But half the honest black laborers were gone. The crippled
ranks of industrial organization in the mid-Mississippi Valley cannot be
recruited from Ellis Island, because in Europe men are dead and maimed,
and restoration, when restoration comes, will raise a European demand
for labor such as this age has never seen. The vision of industrial
supremacy has come to the giants who lead American industry and finance.
But it can never be realized unless the laborers are here to do the
work,--the skilled laborers, the common laborers, the willing laborers,
the well-paid laborers. The present forces, organized however c