“The opportunity to vote will also tend to hold them. Politicians are encouraging Negroes to remain; as they are very generally Republican. Northern Negroes are encouraging them to stay because it gives them more power; and after the Negro casts his vote and takes part in political meetings, he is just like the naturalized foreigner—he likes it and stays. Of course the white people rule, because superior intelligence and wealth always rule. But the black man enjoys being a part of the Government and being called upon every year to have his “say”.... While there is no more social equality in the North than there is in the South, and practically no desire for the same, the longer the Negro lives there, the opportunities to enjoy himself according to his means appeal to him. He earns more money, can live in a better house, buy better clothes, develops more accomplishments, has more leisure and has more protection in his enjoyment. Personally, I think it is good both for the Negroes and for the whites that a million or two million Negroes leave the South. It will make room for a large number of foreigners to come to the South and will tend to divorce the South’s labor problem more widely from its race problem, and will give it a new perspective. It will also rob the South of the fear of ‘Negro domination’ and will give it a chance to give a better expression to our democratic principles. On the other hand the scattering the Negroes throughout the country will bring them in touch with the forces of organized labor in a way to bring them better protection, while it will also acquaint the North with the Negro in such a way as to give it a more intelligent grasp of our general problem of racial relations.”[358] Meanwhile with views for and views against, shouted to them, from all sides, the Negroes moved up from the South to the North and West and to the great centers of industry, to supply the place of immigrants and soldiers passed and passing to Europe for the great war. To the reading Negro, wherever he was, North or South in this year just before the entrance of the great Republic into the greatest war of all time, came “The New Negro, His Political and Civil Status and Related Essays,” by William Pickens, Lit. D. Easily comprehended, popularly composed, they opened with the usual attack upon the black laws of the South in the sixties, the author especially singling out the code of South Carolina for criticism. Of them generally he says: “From the standpoint of the Negro’s interests, however, these laws were ‘black’, not only in name and aim, but in their very nature. Instead of being the property of a personally interested master, the Negro was to be converted into the slave of a much less sympathetic society in general.”[359] But strange to say this critic, in 1916, actually proclaims that—