So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian--as I shall show. The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880 Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about 45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of Philadelphia increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent., and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured population now exceeding 80,000. [Illustration: A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE] [Illustration: OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS] It is difficult to realise the significance of these masses of coloured population. The city of Washington to-day has a greater community of Negroes (some 100,000) than were ever before gathered together in one community in any part of the world, so far as we know. New York and Philadelphia both now probably have as many Negroes as any Southern city (except Washington, if that be called a Southern city). Nor must it be forgotten that about a ninth of the Negro population of the United States is in the North and West. Crowded communities of Negroes in Northern latitudes have never before existed anywhere. Northern city conditions therefore present unique and interesting problems. I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and more difficult problems were constantly arising. Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of prejudice. While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon, and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their strong Southern point of view. _Pathetic Expectations of the Negro_