white man might do, lynch him! The real argument of competition works just the other way. The inferior Negro is not likely to take the bread out of the mouth of the superior white man; but, when relieved from the abnormal conditions of slavery and of Reconstruction, he may still be able to hold his own in the struggle for existence. Emancipation threw upon the Negro the responsibility for his own keeping. The most that he can ask is a fair field without artificial hindrances or limitations; and in such a field a race on the average inferior may nevertheless find tasks in which it excels, and may maintain its race life unimpaired. Kelly Miller says: "You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, I was born with an iron hoe in my hand"; and the world needs the hoe hand just as much as the silversmith. It would appear that for the uplift of the Negro something is needed on the white side: remembrance of the foundations of American liberty, of the workings of Christianity, of the economic truth that you are not made poor because your neighbor gets on in the world. The curse of the South is that its people do not more genuinely realize that the more active, industrious, and thrifty a people become, the more their neighbors receive out of the enlarged contribution to the community. If the Negroes were all as intelligent as Roscoe Conkling Bruce, as forehanded as Benson of Kowaliga, as lyric as Paul Dunbar, the Whites in the South might get rich out of the trade of the Negro, and some of them see it so. For instance, President Winston, of the Agricultural College of North Carolina: "Greater industrial efficiency would prove an everlasting bond between the races in the South. It is the real key to the problem. Let the Negro make himself indispensable as a workman, and he may rely upon the friendship and affection of the whites.... Public sentiment in the South still welcomes the Negro to every field of labor that he is capable of performing. The whole field of industry is open to him. The Southern whites are not troubled by his efficiency but by his inefficiency." Meantime the really industrious Negroes, of whom there are a couple of million or more, follow the advice of Paul Dunbar: I've a humble little motto That is homely, though it's true,-- Keep a-pluggin' away. It's a thing when I've an object That I always try to do,-- Keep a-pluggin' away. When you've rising storms to quell, When opposing waters swell, It will never fail to tell,-- Keep a-pluggin' away.