“In your ordinance you involve the bread of my people. Recently I stood in Pierce Street and overheard this conversation: A colored woman was asked, ‘Did you get the place?’ ‘Yes, I got it and started to work, when the lady asked me where I lived, and when I told her she said she could not have any one in her house who came from that street. She said there was too much disease there.’ It remained for that woman to move. With the West ordinance in force, where could she go? We have already a crowded colored population. For her to move out meant for some one else to move in. It affects not only the employed, but the employer, and the only way out is for the man who hires a servant to go to the additional expense of renting or buying a house for his servants in more healthy quarters, which will aggravate the already troublesome help problem.” The Philadelphia Ledger adds helplessly: “How the Negro is going to be helped to rise under these circumstances is one of the inscrutable problems of our time and generation. His own unaided efforts are blocked everywhere by caste restrictions and discriminations.” The New York Globe says: “The Negro has been told to smile and look pleasant as his political rights have been taken from him. The argument has been that if he did not make a fuss over voting the race prejudice of his white fellow citizen would abate—that he would be given a freer chance to work, to acquire property, to become of material weight in the community. But, North as well as South, doors of industry are being shut against the Negro. The economic tragedy of the educated Negro who aspires to good things is pitiful. He finds either that personal effort and merit do not count, or that they do not count much. In many places it is against the Negro who is not willing to stay down in the mire that antipathy blazes the most brightly. He is the ‘biggotty nigger’.” Finally the Boston Herald pauses to remark: “We purchased more than we knew with that first cargo of slaves sold by the Dutch captain to the Virginia planters now almost three hundred years ago.” GOMPERS. It seems pretty certain that Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, was to some extent misquoted on the Negro problem. The official version given by Mr. Charles Stetzle is as follows: “The race problem came up in the convention, but not altogether by the choice of the delegates. President Gompers had given an address on the depressed races, remarking that it could not be expected that the Negro, for instance, could have as high an ideal for himself as the Caucasian. A morning newspaper came out next morning and in big headlines said that Gompers had ‘read the Negro out of the trades union,’ when, as a matter of fact, Gompers meant exactly the opposite. He took occasion to correct the erroneous impression which had been made upon the public. At any rate, he spoke of it at least three different times in public addresses.”