Such is the deplorable condition of the laboring classes in the west, the north and the east.  They are bound to the car of capital, and are being ground to powder as fast as day follows day.  They organize in vain; they protest in vain; they appeal in vain.  Civilization is doing its work.  “To him that hath, more shall be given; to him that hath nothing, even that shall be taken from him.”

Let us turn to the South and see if a black skin has anything to do with the tyranny of capital; let us see if the cause of the laboring man is not the same in all sections, in all States, in all governments, in the Union, as it is in all the world.  If this can be shown; if I can incontestably demonstrate that the condition of the black and the white laborer is the same, and that consequently their cause is common; that they should unite under the one banner and work upon the same platform of principles for the uplifting of labor, the more equal distribution of the products of labor and capital, I shall not have written this book in vain, and the patient reader will not have read after me without profit to himself and the common cause of a common humanity.

FOOTNOTES: 

[14] W.G.  Moody:  Land and Labor in the United States.

[15] Wm. Goodwin Moody shows this conclusively in his work on Land and Labor in the United States.

CHAPTER XIII

Conditions of Labor in the South

I am not seriously concerned about the frightful political disorders which have disgraced the Southern States since the close of the War of the Rebellion; nor am I seriously concerned about the race-wars in that section about which so much has been justly said, and about which so very little is really known, in spite of the vast mass of testimony that did not more than begin to tell the tale.  I know that time and education will give proper adjustment to the politics of the South, and that the best men of all classes, the intelligent and the property-holders will eventually grasp the reins of political or civil power and give, as far as they can, equilibrium to the unbalanced conditions.

The men of natural parts, of superior culture and ambitious spirit usually, in all societies, manage to rise to the top as the natural rulers of the people.  You cannot keep them down; you cannot repress them.  They rise to the top as naturally as sparks fly upward to the heavens.  Demagogues and quacks manage only to impose upon the ignorant and confiding, upon men, conscious of their own inability to rule, who gladly transfer the responsibility to the first loud-mouthed fellow who comes along claiming, as his own, superior capacity and virtue.  Intelligent men do not permit ignoramuses and adventurers to rule them; they prefer to rule themselves; and they submit to be ruled by such interlopers only so long as it takes them to thoroughly