The Census of 1860 shows, that in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, there were 3,237 free persons of color and that 357 of them returned property for taxation, on which they paid $12,015.60 in taxes, mainly upon real estate, probably about seven-eighths of the whole. But they also paid taxes on income and business, as well as head taxes on the slaves they owned and upon their horses, carriages and dogs. With the generally accepted average value for slaves and a safe valuation for horse-flesh, as the value of the real estate is disclosed, we can calculate that the aggregate wealth of the free persons of color in Charleston, S. C., in 1860 must have been about $888,650. Unless there was some particular advantage, materially, in a residence, by free persons of color, in that State and city most identified with “the peculiar institution,” the per capita established can be extended to the whole population of this class in the United States, at that date; which would have accordingly amounted to about $133,989,231. Of course there may have been greater wealth among the free persons of color in Charleston than in the rest of the State of South Carolina; but for the same reason there would have been still greater wealth in New Orleans and the greater cities of the North, where real estate was necessarily of greater value with a greater growth. As the free persons of color had more than quadrupled in the six decades ending in 1860, what reason is there to think that, inured to the responsibilities of freedom, their rate of increase, after the emancipation of the mass of slaves, should have materially lessened? With the Negro slaves emancipated in mass it would be different; and therefore it is not at all unlikely, that of the $1,100,000,000 owned in 1919 by the entire Negro population of the United States, something like $535,957,124 should be credited to the descendants of the free persons of color, best equipped at the outset to reap their share of the wealth the War between the States brought to the North and West, rather than to the greater number of the emancipated remaining in the impoverished South and suffering with the whites the evils of Congressional Reconstruction. That it took the South until 1890 to regain in material wealth what they had lost between 1861 and 1876, while in the same period the advance in material gain in the North and West was the envy of the world, but clinches the argument. Selfishness is, however, not infrequently the accompaniment of increasing prosperity and, therefore, it should not surprise any thoughtful individual to note, that the cultured DuBois and not a few of his white acclaimers look somewhat askance at the steady movement of the Southern Negroes out of the South and into the North and West. This is not the attitude, however, of that Negro whose name heads the report of the committee on the Chicago riot.