The importance to the Negro of the vote is quickly appreciated when we consider New York's attitude unofficially expressed. With the franchise behind him the colored man can secure for himself and his children the municipality's advantages of education, health, amusement, philanthropy. He is here a citizen, a contributor to the city treasury, if not directly as a taxpayer, as a worker and renter. But as a private individual, seeking to use the utilities managed by other private individuals, he continually encounters race discrimination. Private doors are closed, and were the state not so wealthy and generous, disabilities still graver than at present would follow. A few examples will show the condition. A Negro applies by letter for admission to an automobile school, and is accepted; but on appearing with his fee his color debars his entrance. Carrying the case to court, the complaint is dismissed on the ground that the law which forbade exclusion from places of education on account of race and color is applicable only to public schools. Private institutions may do as they desire. Again, a colored man tries to get a meal. At the first restaurant he is told that all the tables are engaged; at the next no one will serve him. Fearful of further rebuffs, he has to turn to the counter of a railway station. He wants to go to the theatre. Like Tommy Atkins, he is sent to the gallery or round the music halls. The white barber whose shop he enters will not shave him; and when night comes, he searches a long time before the hotel appears that will give him a bed. The sensitive man, still more the sensitive woman, often finds the city's attitude difficult to endure. American Negroes have become familiar with racial lines, but the foreigner of African descent, a visitor to the city, meets with rebuffs that fill him with surprise as well as rage. Haytians and South Americans, men of continental education and wide culture, have been ordered away as "niggers" from restaurant doors, and at the box office of the theatre refused an orchestra seat. English Negroes from the West Indies, men and women of character and means, learn that New York is a spot to be avoided, and cross the ocean when they wish to taste of city life. In short, the stranger of Negro descent, if he be rash of temper, hurls anathemas at the villainously mannered Americans; or, if he be good-natured, shrugs his shoulders and counts New York a provincial settlement of four million people.