nor a pauper, nor a tramp.”  He is, essentially, a man of the largest wealth, God having given him, under tropical conditions, a powerful physique, with ample muscle and constitution to extract out of the repositories of nature her buried wealth.  He only needs intelligence to use the wealth he creates.  When he has intelligence, he will no longer labor to enrich men more designing and unscrupulous than he is; he will labor to enrich himself and his children.  Indeed, in his powerful muscle and enduring physical constitution, directed by intelligence, the black man of the South, who alone has demonstrated his capacity to labor with success in the rice swamps, the cotton, and the cornfields of the South, will ultimately turn the tables upon the unscrupulous harpies who have robbed him for more than two hundred years; and from having been the slave of these men, he, in turn, will enslave them.  From having been the slave, he will become the master; from having labored to enrich others, he will force others to labor to enrich him.  The laws of nature are inexorable, and this is one of them.  The white men of the South may turn pale with rage at this aspect of the case, but it is written on the wall.  Already I have seen in the South the black and white farm laborer, working side by side for a black landlord; already I have seen in the South a black and a white brick-mason (and carpenters as well) working upon a building side by side, under a colored contractor.  And we are not yet two decades from the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the manumission of the black slave.

I have no disposition to infuriate any white man of the South, by placing a red flag before him; we simply desire to accustom him to look upon a picture which his grand-children will not, because of the frequency of the occurrence, regard with anything more heart-rending than complacent indifference.  The world moves forward; and the white man of the South could not stand still, if he so desired.  Like the black man, he must work, or perish; like the black man, he must submit to the sharpest competition, and rise or fall, as the case may be.  And so it should be.

CHAPTER XIV

Classes in the South

Since the war the people of the South are, from a Northern standpoint, very poor.  There are very few millionaires among them.  A man who has a bank account of fifty thousand dollars is regarded as very rich.  I am reminded of an incident which shows that the Southern people fall down and worship a golden calf the same as their deluded brothers of the North and West.