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132 The Crisis 

EDITORIAL

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The New Year
A New Year, Comrades! Come, let us sit here high in the Hills of Life and take counsel one with another.  How goes the battle there below, down where dark waters foam, and dun dust fills the nostrils and the hurry and sweat of human kind is everywhere? Evil, evil, yes, I know. Yonder is murder: so thick is the air with blood and groans that our pulses no longer quicken, our eyes and ears are dull.  Here, to home-wards, is breathless gain and gambling and the steady, unchecked, almost unnoticed growth of human hate.

What then, Comrades? Shall we give up? Shall we hold our hands and voices, shall we cease complaint? Shall we forego striving, shall we bury hope?

Never! Such is the way of weaklings and cowards. Up! Look! See the faint flamings to northwards, hear the faint voices in the East, and the song that sings in the West, swelling softly above the sigh. Courage then and grim content. What more can true men ask than God's alembic, Time? Behold this greatest of Christmas gifts - A New Year: A clean, white sheet of Life, the rugged swell of endless earth, the great, swift curve of sky; and all within the unshaken Will to be, the unfaltering Dream to do - what more shall we ask, Comrades, what more was ever asked of men?

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LAZY LABOR
For bull-headed inability to reason, commend us to Mr. John A. Todd, B.L., who has recently published "The World's Cotton Crops." He says:
"But even if the boll weevil were extinct tomorrow, the increase of the American cotton area would still be hindered by another difficulty; namely, the lack of sufficient labor. Cotton has always been regarded as a cheap-labor crop, that is to say, a crop that can only be profitably cultivated where there is an ample supply of cheap labor. Such a supply of labor was obtained in the United States by the introduction of the slaves, who, though neither very industrious nor efficient, could be trained to the necessary process of cultivating and picking. Indeed, it is admitted that a good Negro is the best cotton cultivator, if he can be persuaded to do his best.  But since the liberation of the slaves, good Negroes have become almost the exception; the average 'nigger' has an incurable aversion to the steady and especially prolonged labor. Two or three days' labor will earn a wage sufficient to keep him for a week, and that is all he wants. Nothing will persuade him to work six days a week, let alone seven, even in the busiest part of the picking season, when, owing to the uncertainty of the weather, a day's delay may mean irreparable damage to his crop. No matter what happens, he must have his Saturday off to go to town and buy 'rations' and spend his week's wage. Even when the land and crop are his own, he seems to have no desire to make more money than is sufficient to keep him, and is quite content to remain a day-laborer all his life, when a few years of steady hard work and careful savings would put him in a position of independence, from which he might easily rise to comparative affluence. The scarcity of labor" ...

EDITORIAL 133
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... "has only resulted in raising the general level of wages, and enabling the Negro to adopt a higher standard of living, and copy the luxuries of the white man. A horse and saddle to ride to town with on Saturdays, expensive clothes, and the best brown boots that money can buy, gold-filled teeth, and gramophones, are his idea of life. The contrast between all this and the position of the Egyptian fellah, with his unlimited capacity for patient plodding work from morning to night, for almost seven days a week, and from one year's end to another, on a wage of less than a quarter of that of the American Negro, which yet enables him to maintain the standard of living that makes him the healthiest and strongest agricultural laborer in the world, is painful in the extreme."

It occurs to us to make two comments: First, if this kind of "laziness" has succeeded in raising the rate of wages and the standard of living of blank men we strongly recommend more laziness of the same kind. Secondly, we wish to call to Mr. Todd's mind the fact that not only has this lazy laborer bought "brown boots" and "gramophones" but also, according to the census of 1910, 218,972 of these families representing over a million people have also bought land. This land has increased from 6,000,000 acres in 1880 to 8,000,000 in 1890; 12,000,000 in 1900, and 20,000,000 in 1910, or a realm as large as Ireland. We have we assure Mr. Todd, deep sympathy with the patient plodding Egyptian fellah but we hope to high Heaven that he will soon get "lazy" enough to raise his wage to some dim resemblance of decency.

THE LATEST CRAZE
OKLAHOMA seems to be a natural hunting ground for those persons, white and black, who wish to mislead colored people. Yesterday it was Chief Sam and his West African Migration. Today it is the "Chief...

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... Counsel for the Civil War Cotton Revenue Tax Claimants of Sixty-Eight Million Dollars." The Secretary of the Treasury said last month: "There is no fund of $68,000,000, or any other sum in the treasury of the United States for former slaves or their heirs, or for any other persons who worked in the cotton fields of the South."
This, however, does not worry that "Attorney of Record" who lightly says that even if the money is not there his organization proposes to claim it. Of course, he can claim it and anybody else can claim it and they may also claim the moon but the chance of getting the one is about as great as that of getting the other. We trust that few colored people are going to be beguiled into throwing away their money in such a quest.

Editorial from Le Nouvelliste, Port-Au-Prince, Haiti

THE American eagle is spreading its wings more and more upon our territory. The events of yesterday were a living expression of the clearly out-lined and executed purpose of the Star-Spangled Republic in disembarking its troops.
"While putting into effect the plan long delayed, the northern republic seems to say to the world that she is re-establishing order and peace and, to us Haitians especially, that we have no reason at all for anxiety. But how can we lend an ear to such declarations when the American occupation, in the more than suggestive form adopted yesterday, is not only an annexation, not even a protectorate, but rather a frank attempt at colonization, if we can things by their names, without ambiguity and without euphemisms.