le in
America. The whole country is still in only the earlier years of its
striving. While the United States has made great advance in applied
science, she has as yet produced no Shakespeare or Beethoven. If America
has not yet reached her height after three hundred years of striving,
she ought not to be impatient with the Negro after only sixty years
of opportunity. But all signs go to prove the assumption of limited
intellectual ability fundamentally false. Already some of the younger
men of the race have given the highest possible promise.

If all of this, however, is granted, and if the Negro's exemplification
of the principle of self-help is also recognized, the question still
remains: Just what is the race worth as a constructive factor in
American civilization? Is it finally to be an agency for the upbuilding
of the nation, or simply one of the forces that retard? What is its real
promise in American life?

In reply to this it might be worth while to consider first of all
the country's industrial life. The South, and very largely the whole
country, depends upon Negro men and women as the stable labor supply in
such occupations as farming, saw-milling, mining, cooking, and washing.
All of this is hard work, and necessary work. In 1910, of 3,178,554
Negro men at work, 981,922 were listed as farm laborers and 798,509 as
farmers. That is to say, 56 per cent of the whole number were engaged in
raising farm products either on their own account or by way of assisting
somebody else, and the great staples of course were the cotton and corn
of the Southern states. If along with the farmers we take those engaged
in the occupations employing the next greatest numbers of men--those of
the building and hand trades, saw and planing mills, as well as those
of railway firemen and porters, draymen, teamsters, and coal mine
operatives--we shall find a total of 71.2 per cent engaged in such work
as represents the very foundation of American industry. Of the women at
work, 1,047,146, or 52 per cent, were either farm laborers or farmers,
and 28 per cent more were either cooks or washerwomen. In other words, a
total of exactly 80 per cent were engaged in some of the hardest and at
the same time some of the most vital labor in our home and industrial
life. The new emphasis on the Negro as an industrial factor in the
course of the recent war is well known. When immigration ceased, upon
his shoulders very largely fell the task of keeping