seems probable, then we have a mass of
workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of
the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of
the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer
needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts
in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to
prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race
have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous
education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After
Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group
leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to
inquire whose duty it was--whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose
edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but
I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were
not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without
skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection
of law, order, and decency,--left in a great land, not to settle down
to slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown
almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best
of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant
is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights
or welfare of his neighbor.

For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day
which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of
the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their
trade-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten
commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy
of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory
acts,--the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern
gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has
never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who have
come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New
South,--the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for