But the most serious obstacle to the black man, the country over, is the threatened narrowing of his industrial opportunities. Here has been his vantage-ground at the South, because his productive power was so great--by numbers and by his inherited and traditional skill,--that there was no choice but to employ him. At the North, where he is in so small a minority as to be unimportant, he has been crowded into an ever narrowing circle of employments. Precisely the same sentiment, though not so ingeniously formulated, which makes the white gentleman refuse to receive the black gentleman in his drawing-room, inclines the white carpenter or mason to refuse to work alongside of his negro fellow-laborer. Yet against this we have the accomplished fact, in the South, of black and white laborers actually working together, harmoniously and successfully, in most industries. We see the divided and wavering attitude of the trade-unions; some branches taking whites and blacks into the same society; others allying white societies and black societies on an equal footing; others refusing all affiliation; the earlier declarations of the national leaders for the broadest human fellowship challenged and often giving way before the imperious assertions of the caste spirit. A race closely intermixed with another superior to it in numbers, wealth, and intelligence,--a self-conscious and self-assertive race,--suffers at many points. There are abuses tolerated by law; infractions and evasions of law; semi-slavery under the name of peonage; impositions by the landlord and the creditor. There are unpunished outrages,--let one typical case suffice: a negro farmer and produce dealer, respected and esteemed by all, in place of a rude shanty puts up a good building for his wares; the word goes round among the roughs, "that nigger is getting too biggity," and his store is burned,--nobody surprised and nobody punished. Then there is the chapter of lynchings: First, the gross crime of some human brute, then a sudden passionate vengeance by the community; the custom spreads; it runs into hideous torture and public exultation in it; it extends to other crimes; it knows no geographical boundaries but spreads like an evil infection over the country--but most of its victims are of the despised race. Against the worst outrages the best men of all sections are arrayed in condemnation and resistance. But of its own essential and final social superiority the white South brooks no question. It expects its social code to be observed by the nation's representatives. It forgets that the nation's representatives are cognizant of the general code of the civilized world,--that breeding, manners, and intelligence, constitute the gentleman. So when President Roosevelt entertains as his guest the foremost man of the negro race,--easily one of the foremost half-dozen men in the country,--the white South indulges in a mood which to the rest of the world can only appear as prolonged hysteria.