Now, to such federations of labour, to such combinations for the commonweal, involving, as they so often do, the most determined self-renunciation, the most heroic self-sacrifice, even the Caucasian nature is by no means full-grown, and the Negroid is altogether unequal. There is not the slightest probability that the great labour organizations would, in general, think of admitting to their membership an element of such notable weakness as the Negro would certainly be. Such would be the case, even if other considerations were absent. But they are present. As inferiors, accustomed to a lower standard of life and more pliant to the demands of employers, the Negroes would present the same problem and the same menace as the Chinese--only in a more aggravated form. In their admission in large numbers to the ranks of skilled labour, this latter could not fail to see a terrible and instant threat of reduced wages, of lowered life, of baser thraldom. Race prejudice, if you call it so, would blaze out immediately, and with irresistible violence. It makes not the slightest difference whether labour would be right or wrong, justified or unjustified; it would be the instinct of self-preservation fanned suddenly into vehement flame, and nothing could withstand it. As an example in point, take the violent opposition offered a few years ago by the miners of Illinois to the importation of Negro labourers; take the recent practically total expulsion of Negroes, many of them peaceable and unoffending, from various towns, districts, and counties in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and elsewhere. Consider all this as unreasonable, as outrageous--it matters not; it shows the temper of the American-Caucasian labourer, which will hardly tolerate the competition of his equals, and certainly not of any form of labour lower than his own. And in defence of what he regards as the most important and most sacred of all his rights, he will not hesitate for an instant at the adoption of means.[28] [28] Hear the testimony of the ablest of Negroids, Professor W. E. B. Dubois, in his admirable sociologic study, "The Philadelphia Negro":