The Hattiesburg news. (Hattiesburg, Miss.) 1908-1917, 1911-06-08

kind, is dragging down the level of
life of every other man in the COM
munity. Suppose you are his fellow
citizen; then because of his ineffi-
cheney, his poverty, because of his
failure to contribute to public funds
and public movements, you must have
poorer roads, poorer schools, meaner
school house, and court house, shah
bier church, lower-priced lands; your
teacher will be more poorly paid, your
preachers salary will be smaller, your
newspaper will have a smaller circu-
lation, your town will have a poorer
market, your railroad smaller trade;
ufacturer diminished patronage, and
so on and so on.
Negro Must Become More Efficient.
1.-The ramifications are infinite, I'M
ending. And the doctrine Is true
whatever the color of the man. The
ignorant negro in the South is one Of
the greatest economic burdens with
which any people has ever had to con-
tend. From travel and observation in
ten Southern States I have almost
worked it out as a principle of politi-
cal economy that other things being
equal, states and communities are
prospecting in proportion to their white
population do not know what we
are going to do with the negro. I do
know that we must either from a
scheme of education and training that
will keep him from dragging down the
whole level of life in the South, that
will make him more efficient, a pros
perity-maker, and not a poverty-breed-
err or else he will get out of the South
and give way to the white immigrant.
Fallacies And What They Have
Cost Us.
The farmer, the common laborer
of any sort, needs no training Edu-
cate him and you spoil him. The
poorer you keep him, the richer will
be the upper class" These have been
our great pet fallacies. And long
time have they been preached.
"Hugging this vampire delusion, the
Southern plantation owner has seen
vast areas abandoned to broomsedge
and gullies, in spite of the fact that
intelligent handling would have kept
them productive a thousand years.
Preaching this fatal doctrine, the
merchant has sold Western meat and
scooters and tobacco, when with pros
porous patrons he might have quad
rupled his profits by selling sulky
plows and harvesters and carriages
and pianos.
"Deluded by this fallacy, our states
man has struggled against fate, only
to die and be forgotten by people too
poorly educated to read his biography,
and too poor in prosperity to build a
monument to his memory, while small
er and meaner men in sections I'M
shackled by these ancient errors, are
famed in song and story.
Writing editorials in support of
the aristocratic instead of the demo
cratic theory of industry, the editor
has been his patent outside weekly
fail of support, when properly
trained and educated people would
have brought him wealth and influ-
ence as the head of prosperous
daily
Fighting public taxation for better
schools and other methods of training
and enriching the average man, our
manufacturer has struggled along with
a small business when a prosperous
average man would have given us
great industries like those in the North
and West.
Still arguing that education and
training would spoil the working man,
and that cheap labor is what we
need, our banker has complained that
the South offers no opportunities for
the great financier forgetting that
cheap, unprosperous labor means
Small, unprosperous banks.
Opposing taxation for better
schools, the railroads, hauling cotton
in the fall and law-grade fertilizers in
the spring, have fought passenger rate
reduction as life and death matter
when a well-trained people would sup
ply the various traffic and the heavy
dividends of other sections.
"The lawyer, doctor, preacher,
. teacher-each falling in line with the
ancient fallacy, has paid the penalty
B. in diminished fees, diminished sal
5 aries, diminished influence.
The South's Greatest Errors.
"Of all our errors our greatest has
been the failure to recognize the fact