Reports also show that negroes are accumulating considerable property and are becoming in large numbers the holders of small farms. Nevertheless a very careful scholar, Dr. Walter Willcox, believes that the figures "seem to show that the negro race at the South, in its competition with the whites, lost ground between 1890 and 1900 in the majority of skilled occupations which can be distinguished by the aid of the census figures." Taking the economic status of the race as a whole, the same authority adds: "The conclusion to which I am brought is that relatively to the whites in the South, if not absolutely as measured by any conceivable standard, the negro as a race is losing ground, is being confined more and more to the inferior and less remunerative occupations, and is not sharing proportionately to his numbers in the prosperity of the country as a whole or of the section in which he mainly lives." The conclusions of the statistician are confirmed by the impressions of such eminent champions of the negro as Dr. W. B. Dubois and Mr. Thomas Fortune. The former declares that "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." The latter holds that the negro has simply passed from chattel to industrial slavery "with none of the legal and selfish restraints upon the employer which surrounded and actuated the master." These writers attribute the slow advance of the race to the bondage of law and prejudice to which it is subjected in the South, and everywhere in the country, as a matter of fact. Whatever the cause may be, there seems to be no doubt that the colored race has not made that substantial economic advance and achieved that standard of life which its friends hoped would follow from emancipation. Those writers who emphasize heredity in social evolution point to this as an evidence of the inherent disabilities of the race; while those who emphasize environment point out the immense handicap everywhere imposed on the race by law, custom, and prejudice.