What is it that makes a successful laboring force? It is laborers of education and natural intelligence, reasonably satisfied with their conditions, inspired with certain ideals of life, and with a growing sense of self-respect and self-reliance. How is the caste system of the South influencing the Negro laborer? It is systematically restricting his development; it is restricting his education so that the public common schools of the South except in a few cities are worse this moment than they were twenty years ago; it is seeking to kill self-respect by putting upon the accident of color every mark of humiliation that it can invent; it is discouraging self-reliance by treating a class of men as wards and children; it is killing ambition by drawing a color line instead of a line of desert and accomplishment; and finally, through these things, it is encouraging crime, and by the unintelligent and brutal treatment of criminals, it is developing more crime. This general attitude toward the main laboring class reflects itself less glaringly but as certainly in the treatment even of white laborers. So long as white labor must compete with black labor, it must approximate black labor conditions--long hours, small wages, child labor, labor of women, and even peonage. Moreover it can raise itself above black labor only by a legalized caste system which will cut off competition and this is what the South is straining every nerve to create. The last fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Massacre was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against the growing competition of black men, so that black men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom. It succeeded so well that smouldering hate burst into flaming murder before the politicians could curb it. There is, however, a limit to this sort of thing. The day when mobs can successfully cow the Negro to willing slavery is past. The Atlanta Negroes shot back and shot to kill, and that stopped the riot with a certain suddenness (see Note 15). The South is realizing that lawlessness and economic advance cannot coexist. If the wonderful industrial revolution is to develop unhindered, the South must have law and order and it must have intelligent workmen. It is only a question of time when white working men and black working men will see their common cause against the aggressions of exploiting capitalists. Already there are signs of this: white and black miners are working as a unit in Alabama; white and black masons are in one union in Atlanta (see Note 16). The economic strength of the Negro cannot be beaten into weakness, and therefore it must be taken into partnership, and this the Southern white working man, befuddled by prejudice as he is, begins dimly to realize.