A few years ago I was a resident of Jacksonville, the metropolis of Florida.  Florida is a great Winter resort.  The wealthy people of the country go there for a few months or weeks in the Winter.  It is fashionable to do so.  A great many wealthy northern men have acquired valuable landed interests in Jacksonville, among them the Astors of New York, who have a knack for pinning their interests in the soil.  The people of Jacksonville were very proud to have as a resident and property holder, Mr. Wm. B. Astor.  And Mr. Astor appeared to enjoy immensely the worship bestowed upon his money.  He built one or two very fine buildings there, which must net him a handsome return for his investment by this time.  Mr. Astor had with him a very shrewd “Man Friday,” and this Man Friday got it into his head that he would like to be Mayor of Jacksonville, and he sought and obtained the support of his very powerful patron.  It leaked out that Mr. Astor favored his Man Friday for Mayor.  The “business interests” of the city took the matter “under advisement.”  After much “consultation” and preliminary skirmishing, it was decided that it would be unwise to antagonize Mr. Astor’s Man Friday; and so he was placed in nomination as the “Citizens’ Candidate.”  He was elected by a handsome majority.  I believe it is a disputed question to-day, whether Mr. Astor’s Man Friday was, or was not, a citizen of the place at the time he was elected Mayor.  Be that as it may, it showed beyond question that the people knew how to go down upon their knees to the golden calf.

A condition of slavery or of serfdom produces two grievous evils, around which cluster many others of less importance, viz:  the creation of vast landed estates, and the pauperization and debasement of labor.  Pliny declared that to the creation of vast latifundia (aggregated estates) Italy owed its downfall.  The same is true of the downfall of the South and its pet institution, since they produced a powerful and arrogant class which was not content to lord it on their vast demesnes and over their pauper labor, but must needs carry their high-flown notions into the councils of the nation, flaunting their gentle birth and undulating acres in the faces of horny-handed statesmen like Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wilson, and others.

The operations of the vast landed estates of the South produced all the industrial disjointments which have afflicted the South since the war.  The white man was taught to look upon labor as the natural portion of the black slave; and nothing could induce a white man to put his hand to the plow, but the gaunt visage of starvation at his door.  He even preferred ignominious starvation to honest work; and, in his desperate struggle to avoid the horror of the one and the disgrace of the other, he would sink himself lower in the scale of moral infamy than the black slave he despised.  He would make of himself a monster of cruelty or of abject servility to avoid starvation