“It is probable that as a nation we have come to the end of the period of very rapid increase in our population. Restricted immigration will reduce the rate of increase and force us back upon our older population to find people to do the simpler physically harder manual tasks. This will require some difficult adjustments. In anticipation of such a condition the South may well recognize that the North and West are likely to continue their drains upon its colored population, and that if the South wishes to keep its fields producing and its industry still expanding it will have to compete for the services of the colored man.”[372] To this, the most important part of the President’s remarks, while complimenting the tone and spirit of the whole, the same paper in which Carlyle McKinley in 1889 sought to reveal to the South its true policy, thus replied: “The South would be glad to see a considerable part of the negro population in this section find homes in other sections.”[373] The comment of that Northern publication which had, as has been shown, most intelligently discussed the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and West in 1916, was to the effect that while the President’s scheme had much to recommend it as far as the spirit was concerned, yet— “The South knows as President Harding ought to know that you can’t draw a sharp line between politics and social life. The offices of a State are in most parts of America positions of social leadership. With complete political equality the State of Mississippi might easily elect a Negro as governor. Would such a result be accepted by Mississippi as devoid of social significance? The race problem unfortunately is not one that admits of easy general solutions.”[374] The President’s speech appeared about the time at which Dr. DuBois returned from the second of the Pan-African congresses in Europe, which he had been mainly instrumental in convening and at which there were Negroes and mulattoes from West and South Africa, British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica, Nigeria and the Gold Coast; Indians from India and East Africa; colored men from London; and twenty-five American Negroes. There were meetings at London, Brussels and Paris. The London congress over which presided a distinguished English administrator, later Secretary of State for India, Sir Sidney Olivier, was mild, the chairman making no attempt to control the findings. But at Brussels, where— “the black Senegalese, Blaise Diagne, French Deputy and High Commissioner of African troops—”[375] presided— DuBois says— “We sensed the fear about us in a war land with nerves still taut.”[376] It seems Oswald Garrison Villard, with that refreshing conceit which tempts him to discuss any subject whether he knows anything about it or not, had been ignorantly denouncing conscription, imposed on French Negroes.