In the North Atlantic, the North Central, and the Western census divisions of the United States, the potential voting strength of the Negroes is more than a quarter million. It is larger than was the combined prohibition and socialist vote in 1900 and exceeds by nearly a hundred thousand the total combined vote cast for the present governors of the four states of Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama. In many sections of the North and West the Negro population is sparse and scattering, varying all the way from one in Scott County in Indiana to 63,000 in Philadelphia. Yet in many localities where there is almost an even balance of the two chief parties, the Negro vote is competent to decide the results of election. In the states of Delaware Indiana, Ohio, Connecticut, New Jersey, and several districts in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, a united, coherent Negro vote may frequently determine both local and national elections. This is shown by the returns in 1902 for Congressional election in four districts in Indiana, two in New Jersey, four in Ohio, and two in Massachusetts and Connecticut, where the Negro vote was of sufficient size to have thrown the election to either party. In state and local elections where party fealty is not always so strong as in national elections, owing to dissatisfaction with both men and measures, the potentiality of the Negro vote can be made very real and effective as well as respectable. The municipal wards and legislative districts in the large commercial and manufacturing centers of the North and West furnish undoubted opportunities for the Negro vote to make itself felt and to win regard and respect as far away as the United States Senate. The foregoing facts and considerations suggest interesting possibilities and, in view of the conditions affecting the political, civil, and economic well being of the people of color in the United States, they create a demand and an obligation with reference to the use of which the Negro voter should make of his right of the franchise.