te condition produced. The governments of
antiquity were great and glorious, because their proletarians were
intelligent, thrifty and brave, but the proletarians fade into
vagueness, and are great only in the few great names which have been
handed down to us. It has been said that a nation expends a hundred
years of its vitality in the production of a great man of genius like
Socrates, or Bacon, or Toussaint l'Overture, or Fulton. And this may
be true. There can now be no question that the African race in the
United States possess every element of vitality and genius possessed
by their fellow citizens of other races, and any calculation of race
possibilities in this country which assumes that they will remain
indefinitely the "mudsills" only of society will prove more brittle
than ropes of sand.

At this time the colored people of the South are largely the
industrial class; that is, they are the producing class. They are
principally the agriculturists of the South; consequently, being
wedded to the soil by life-long association and interest, and being
principally the laboring class, they will naturally invest their
surplus earnings in the purchase of the soil. Herein lies the great
hope of the future. For the man who owns the soil largely owns and
dictates to the men who are compelled to live upon it and derive
their subsistence from it. The colored people of the South recognize
this fact. And if there is any one idiosyncrasy more marked than
another among them, it is their mania for buying land. They all live
and labor in the cheerful anticipation of some day owning a home, a
farm of their own. As the race grows in intelligence this mania for
land owning becomes more and more pronounced. At first their
impecuniosity will compel them to purchase poor hill-lands, but they
will eventually get their grip upon the rich alluvial lands.

The class next to the great black class is the _small white farmers_.
This class is composed of some of the "best families" of the South who
were thrown upon their resources of brain and muscle by the results of
the war, and of some of the worst families drawn from the more thrifty
poor white class. Southern political economists labor hard to make it
appear that the vastly increased production of wealth in the South
since the war is to be traced largely to the phenomenally increased
percentum of small white farmers, but the assumption is too
transparent to impose upon any save those most ig