To this end the South strove to make the disfranchisement of the Negroes effective and final. Up to this time disfranchisement was illegal and based on intimidation. The new laws passed between 1890 and 1910 sought on their face to base the right to vote on property and education in such a way as to exclude poor and illiterate Negroes and admit all whites. In fact they could be administered so as to exclude nearly all Negroes. To this was added a series of laws designed publicly to humiliate and stigmatize Negro blood: as, for example, separate railway cars; separate seats in street cars, and the like; these things were added to the separation in schools and churches, and the denial of redress to seduced colored women, which had long been the custom in the South. All these new enactments meant not simply separation, but subordination, caste, humiliation, and flagrant injustice. To all this was added a series of labor laws making the exploitation of Negro labor more secure. All this legislation had to be accomplished in the face of the labor movement throughout the world, and particularly in the South, where it was beginning to enter among the white workers. This was accomplished easily, however, by an appeal to race prejudice. No method of inflaming the darkest passions of men was unused. The lynching mob was given its glut of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and often wholly invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most peaceful and sweet-tempered race the world has ever known. Under the flame of this outward noise went the more subtle and dangerous work. The election laws passed in the states where three-fourths of the Negroes live, were so ingeniously framed that a black university graduate could be prevented from voting and the most ignorant white hoodlum could be admitted to the polls. Labor laws were so arranged that imprisonment for debt was possible and leaving an employer could be made a penitentiary offense. Negro schools were cut off with small appropriations or wholly neglected, and a determined effort was made with wide success to see that no Negro had any voice either in the making or the administration of local, state, or national law. The acquiescence of the white labor vote of the South was further insured by throwing white and black laborers, so far as possible, into rival competing groups and making each feel that the one was the cause of the other's troubles. The neutrality of the white people of the North was secured through their fear for the safety of large investments in the South, and through the fatalistic attitude common both in America and Europe toward the possibility of real advance on the part of the darker nations.