If the war has taught us anything, it has given us new respect for labor. There may once have been a time when great plantation owners despised workers in fields; but that time is past. Under the stress of new conditions, our richest captains of industry value the man who can raise cotton or make a shell or fix rivets in a ship. The Negro has importance in America to-day as a working-man; and, aside from all questions of philanthropy or sentiment, he asks for consideration in this capacity. Some of our greatest businesses are becoming dependent upon him. In turn he asks if it is unreasonable for him to expect a man's chance to earn a living, fair wages for fair work, and such working conditions as make for general health and social betterment. In 1910, of 3,178,554 Negro men at work in this country, 981,922 were listed as farm laborers and 798,509 as farmers. That is to say, 56 per cent. of the whole number were engaged in raising farm products either on their own account or by way of assisting somebody else. The great staples were of course the cotton and corn of the Southern states, and the new importance given to these crops by the war no one can gainsay. That is not all, however. If we take along with the farmers those engaged in the next occupations employing the greatest numbers of men--those of the building and hand trades, saw and planing mills, as well as those of railway firemen and porters, draymen, teamsters, and coal mine operatives--we shall find a total of 71.2 per cent. engaged in such work as represents the very foundation of American industry. What of the women? Of these, 1,047,146, or 52 per cent., were either farm laborers or farmers, and 28 per cent. more were either cooks or washerwomen. In other words, a total of exactly 80 per cent. were doing some of the hardest and at the same time some of the most necessary work in our home and industrial life. These are the workers for whom we ask consideration; and we make the request not on the basis of what they did fifty or a hundred years ago, but what they are worth now, to-day, as an important asset in the industrial life of the United States.