police arrests and, of course, the peculiarly Southern method of the mob
and the lyncher. They appealed frantically to the United States
Government; they groveled on their knees and shed wild tears at the
"suffering" of their poor, misguided black friends, and yet, despite
this, the Northern employers simply had to offer two and three dollars a
day and from one-quarter to one-half a million dark workers arose and
poured themselves into the North. They went to the mines of West
Virginia, because war needs coal; they went to the industries of New
Jersey and Pennsylvania, because war needs ships and iron; they went to
the automobiles of Detroit and the load-carrying of Chicago; and they
went to East St. Louis.

Now there came fear in the hearts of the Unwise Men. It was not that
their wages were lowered,--they went even higher. They received, not
simply, a living wage, but a wage that paid for some of the decencies,
and, in East St. Louis, many of the indecencies of life. What they
feared was not deprivation of the things they were used to and the
shadow of poverty, but rather the definite death of their rising dreams.
But if fear was new-born in the hearts of the Unwise Men, the black man
was born in a house of fear; to him poverty of the ugliest and straitest
type was father, mother, and blood-brother. He was slipping stealthily
northward to escape hunger and insult, the hand of oppression, and the
shadow of death.

Here, then, in the wide valley which Father Marquette saw peaceful and
golden, lazy with fruit and river, half-asleep beneath the nod of
God,--here, then, was staged every element for human tragedy, every
element of the modern economic paradox.

* * * * *