And even the masses who respond to the strings know better than they used to; even with them conviction flags and cynicism takes over. The moral conviction that it was for the social welfare that they reserved all power to themselves no longer operates. Power for power’s sake is now the rule, and when a leading Georgia politician said so in a political address, the rafters rang. “We have the power and we mean to keep it where it belongs. If the Negroes vote wholesale, and if the county unit system goes, we’ll have that much less power. But it must not go. The county unit system, which used to protect our rural population from slick city politics, now arms us all with power against the enemies of white supremacy.” The old assumptions hold, but, worse, others have been added to evade the knowledge that cannot now be ignored and to make possible the conformity to the vicious dialectic of power which rings as plangently in America now as in the rest of the world. And the chief of them is this—that hostility is the accepted state in which to live. Dualism is looked on as the natural division of absolute opposites, of enemies: Communism and democracy, Eastern man and Western man, native and foreign, and, most pertinent to this argument, black and white. Not black as formerly—the pathetically weak and erring child of nature; nor white as formerly—the tolerant chastiser and protector, the strong adult. But black raised by the findings of science (and the decisions of the highest court in the land) to close equality with white, and therefore the enemy to white. Exaggerated? But toward truth, not away from it. That competition, which was once confined to the lowest economic levels and which resulted in the legendary hatred of the poor-white masses for the Negro and vice versa, operates on higher levels now. It is on the level of skilled labor, as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen knew when they brought suit to enjoin railroads from promoting Negro firemen (also members of the Brotherhood) to engineers. It is on the level of education, and persons reported to be students of the medical college of the University of South Carolina admitted sending threatening letters to a Negro applicant and burning a cross on his front lawn. It is on the level of the professions, so that a committee of the National Bar Association, a Negro group, felt constrained to report that “as the quality of training rises, Negro lawyers find it harder to win admission to the bar in some Southern states.”