And yet in spite of these difficulties, Negroes come North every year in increasing numbers, they find living expensive, they suffer an unusual amount of sickness and death, they meet more prejudice than they expected to meet, and yet they keep coming. Much as Negroes complain of the hardship of Northern conditions, and though they are sometimes pitifully homesick for the old life in the South, I have yet to find one who wanted to go back--unless he had accumulated enough money to buy land. "Why do they come?" I asked a Negro minister in Philadelphia. "Well, they're treated more like men up here in the North," he said, "that's the secret of it. There's prejudice here, too, but the colour line isn't drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South. It all gets back to a question of manhood." In the North prejudice is more purely economic than it is in the South--an incident of industrial competition. In the South the Negro still has the field of manual labour largely to himself, he is unsharpened by competition; but when he reaches the Northern city, he not only finds the work different and more highly organised and specialised, but he finds that he must meet the fierce competition of half a dozen eager, struggling, ambitious groups of foreigners, who are willing and able to work long hours at low pay in order to get a foothold. He has to meet often for the first time the Italian, the Russian Jew, the Slav, to say nothing of the white American labourer. He finds the pace set by competitive industry immensely harder than in most parts of the South. No life in the world, perhaps, requires as much in brain and muscle of all classes of men as that of the vast Northern cities in the United States. I have talked with many coloured workmen and I am convinced that not a few of them fail, not because of their colour, nor because they are lazy (Negroes in the North are of the most part hard workers--they _must_ be, else they starve or freeze), but for simple lack of speed and skill; they haven't learned to keep the pace set by the white man. A contractor in New York who employs large numbers of men, said to me: "It isn't colour so much as plain efficiency. I haven't any sentiment in the matter at all. It's business. As a general rule the ordinary coloured man can't do as much work nor do it as well as the ordinary white man. The result, is, I don't take coloured men when I can get white men. Yet I have several coloured men who have been with me for years, and I wouldn't part with them for any white man I know. In the same way I would rather employ Italians than Russian Jews: they're stronger workers."