Sec. 2. #Complexity of race problems.# The questions of race composition that we shall here consider are those of the negro and of the immigrant.[1] Both of these questions are complex and go beyond the limits of mere economic considerations, touching the most vital political and social interests of the nation.  Indeed they involve the very soul and existence of peoples, for who can doubt that ultimately racial survival and success are mainly to be determined by physical and spiritual capacity?

The negro in America is the gravest of our population problems.  In large portions of our land it overshadows every other public question.  Yet the negro is here because men of the seventeenth century ignored the complexity of the labor problem and thought only of its economic aspect.  The landowners wished cheaper labor and, reckless of other consequences, they imported slaves from Africa to get it.  They gained for themselves and a few generations of their descendants a measure of comparative ease, but at a frightful cost to our national life—­a cost of which the Civil War now seems to have been merely a first installment on account rather than a final payment.

Sec. 3. #Economic aspects of the negro problem.# The negro as a wage earner is found very little outside of the least skilled branches of a limited range of occupations.  Of these the principal ones, as is a matter of common knowledge, are farm work, domestic service (including janitor service in stores and factories and work in hotels), and crude manual outdoor labor.  Repeated attempts to operate factories with a labor force of negroes have proved unsuccessful.  In some of the better-paying occupations in which large numbers of negroes were found in the North soon after the Civil War, such as barbering, waiting on table in the best hotels, and skilled manual work, they have been largely displaced by European immigrants.  Negroes are a disturbing and unwelcome influence in labor organizations, and even when nominally eligible to membership are in fact rarely accepted.  They very frequently are employed as strike-breakers and this fosters race antagonism both immediately and permanently.

The negro problem is, from our present outlook, insoluble.  The most laudable of present efforts, that for industrial training, represented by Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, and the work of Booker T. Washington, leaves the dire fact of two races side by side and yet unassimilated socially, politically, and, in large measure, economically.  Two other possibilities, race admixture and caste, are both so repellent to white American thought, that they cannot be looked upon as solutions.  Segregation in a separate state, or separate states, is a thorogoing proposal, but is practically impossible.  Finally there is the conceivable, but improbable, event of the decrease and extinction of the negroes in America, Their relative number has declined since 1800,[2] but their absolute number still continues to increase.