Negro pupils sitting by themselves and, angrily charging discrimination, ordered his child to sit among the white children. This feeling of race repulsion was especially noticeable between the working class of white men and the Negroes who come more or less into industrial competition with them. The use of Negroes for breaking strikes in the coalfields and elsewhere has been a fertile source of discord, kindling the fire of race prejudice in places where it never before existed. _How the Negroes Sold Their Votes_ In Springfield there were about 1,500 Negro voters, many of whom were bought at every election. The Democrats and the Republicans were so evenly divided that the city administration was Democratic and the county administration Republican. The venal Negro vote went to the highest bidder, carried the elections, and, with the whiskey influence, governed the town. Springfield, enlightened, educated, progressive, highly American, had 145 saloons--or one to every 285 people. Before the lynching, nine of these were Negro saloons--some of them indescribably vile. A row of houses along the railroad tracks, not three blocks from the heart of the city, was known as the Levee. It was a Negro row composed of saloons and disorderly houses, where the lowest of the low, Negro men and both Negro and white women, made a general rendezvous. Just back of it was one of the foremost Catholic churches in town; hardly a block away were the post-office, the public library, and the foremost club of the city, and within three or four hundred yards were the back doors of some of the city's most aristocratic residences. For years, the ineffective good citizen had protested against these abominable resorts, but when the Republicans wanted to win they needed the votes from these places, and when the Democrats wanted to win _they_ needed them. Burnett, the Democratic boss, said in a tone of real injury to a gentleman--a Democrat--who protested against the protection of the Levee: "Don't you want the party to win? We've got to have those sixty or eighty votes from Hurley"--Hurley being the notorious Negro proprietor of a dive called the Honky Tonk. _Corrupt Politics and the Negro Question_ So these vile places remained open, protected by the police, breeding crime, and encouraging arrogance, idleness, and vice among the Negroes. And yet one will hear good citizens of Springfield complaining that the Negroes make themselves conspicuous and obnoxious at primaries and elections, standing around, waiting, and refusing to vote until they receive money in hand. "To my mind," one of these citizens said to me, "the conspicuousness of the Negro at elections is one of the chief causes of race prejudice."