tures, to
ameliorate the condition of the laboring classes. Capital has placed
its tyrant grip upon the throat of the Goddess of Liberty. The power
of railroad and telegraph corporations, and associated capital
invested in monopolies which oppress the many, while ministering to
the wealth, the comfort and the luxury of the few, has become
omnipotent in halls of legislation, courts of justice, and even in the
Executive Chambers of great States, so that the poor, the oppressed
and the defrauded appeal in vain for justice.

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 int