distinct alien race." I think, if the professor will wait
until 1980, he will find that this "alien race," which profligate
white men have done and are doing so much to amalgamate with their own
race, will not only increase approximately as he has figured it out,
in numbers, but in wealth as well.

The future landlord and capitalist of the South are no longer confined
to the white race: the black man has become a factor, and he must be
counted.

CHAPTER XV

_The Land Problem_

The ownership of land in the South is the same pernicious thing it has
come to be in every civilized country in the world. Instead of being,
as it was intended to be, a blessing to the people, it is the crying
curse which takes precedence of all other evils that afflict mankind.
And the cause is not far to seek. Land is, in its very nature, the
common property of the people. Like air and water, it is one of the
natural elements which inhere in man as a common right, and without
which life could in no wise be sustained. A man must have air, or he
will suffocate; he must have water, or he will perish of thirst; he
must have access to the soil, for upon it grow those things which
nature intended for the sustentation of the physical man, and without
which he cannot live. Deprive me of pure fresh air, and I die; deprive
me of pure fresh water, and I die; deprive me of free opportunity to
earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, by sowing in the sowing time
and reaping in the reaping time, and I die. There is no escape from
this aspect of the case: there is no logic that can reduce these
truisms to sophistries. They are founded in the omnipotent laws of
God, and are as universal as the earth. They apply with as much truth
to life in the United States as in Dahomey; they operate in like
nature upon the savage as upon man in the civilized state. Individual
ownership in the land is a transgression of the common right of man,
and a usurpation which produces nearly, if not all, the evils which
result upon our civilization; the inequalities which produce
pauperism, vice, crime, and wide-spread demoralization among all the
so-called "lower classes;" which produce, side by side, the
millionaire and the tramp, the brownstone front and the hut of the
squatter, the wide extending acres of the bonanza farm and the small
holding, the lord of the manor and the cringing serf, peasant and
slave.

I maintain, with other writers upon this land question, that