The Negro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense, sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home, he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—_he must go away from here_. It is strange, because homesickness is almost a mania with the Negro. He relates himself to the white master’s house where he works, to the rude cabin where his family live, to his church, to the “home niggers,” in an extravagant pathological way which has nothing to do with gratitude. Perhaps it is because as a people the slaves were uprooted out of a home in Africa, and they have a haunting melancholy in the hidden depths of their souls. I believe their childish idealization of heaven in their hymns is fundamentally a sort of homesickness. The Negro is not a natural nomad or vagrant like the Russian, the Jew, the Tartar. He must have been as geographically fixed in his native haunts in Africa. Judge, then, how great a disturbance must take place before the Negro en masse would be ready to emigrate. Yet so it is to-day. With consternation in their aspect, whole families, whole communities, are waiting—to go North. And hundreds of thousands of them are on the move. Of course it is not a complete change of scene. The North has its Negro masses too. One rather loses sight of them among the Whites, but they are there. And they do not cease to invite their unhappy brothers and sisters down South to throw up everything and come North. While it is commonly said that the Negro cannot stand the colder climate of the North, there is, however, not much evidence to that effect. As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant, Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes. On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more hope for the race as a whole than do the others. Perhaps one ought to discount this fact in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes. There is nothing that will undermine the constitution more than terror and nervous depression. Security is the real Negro ozone. There has been during the last three years a steady migration of Negroes northward. This has been primarily due to the stoppage of foreign immigration and the consequent labor shortage in the districts which depended on the immigrant. The reasons why the Negro was ready to leave his Southern habitat have been summarized in the U. S. Department of Labor Report:[5]