One of the questions I asked of Negroes whom I met both North and South was this: "What is your chief cause of complaint?" In the South the first answer nearly always referred to the Jim Crow cars or the Jim Crow railroad stations; after that, the complaint was of political disfranchisement, the difficulty of getting justice in the courts, the lack of good school facilities, and in some localities, of the danger of actual physical violence. But in the North the first answer invariably referred to working conditions. "The Negro isn't given a fair opportunity to get employment. He is discriminated against because he is coloured." Professor Kelly Miller, one of the acutest of Negro writers, has said: "The Negro (in the North) is compelled to loiter around the edges of industry." Southern white men are fond of meeting Northern criticism of Southern treatment of the Negro with the response: "But the North closes the doors of industrial opportunity to the Negro." And yet, in spite of this complaint of conditions in the North, one who looks Southward can almost see the army of Negroes gathering from out of the cities, villages and farms, bringing nothing with them but a buoyant hope in a distant freedom, but tramping always Northward. And they come not alone from the old South, but from the West Indies, where the coloured population looks wistfully toward the heralded opportunities of America. A few are even coming from South Africa and South America. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, thousands of such foreign Negroes know nothing of America traditions; some of them do not even speak the English language. And why do they come if their difficulties are so great? Is it true that there is no chance for them in industry? Are they better or worse off in the North than in the South? In the first place, in most of the smaller Northern cities where the Negro population is not increasing rapidly, discrimination is hardly noticeable. Negroes enter the trades, find places in the shops, or even follow competitive business callings and still maintain friendly relationships with the white people. But the small towns are not typical of the new race conditions in the North; the situation in the greater centres of population where Negro immigration is increasing largely, is decidedly different. As I travelled in the North, I heard many stories of the difficulties which the coloured man had to meet in getting employment. Of course, as a Negro said to me, "there are always places for the coloured man at the bottom." He can always get work at unskilled manual labour, or personal or domestic service--in other words, at menial employment. He has had that in plenty in the South. But what he seeks as he becomes educated is an opportunity for better grades of employment. He wants to rise.