pect to their task, but
whose task sustained to them that relative place instead, were obliged to
do the best they could with whatever quantum of the latter faculty they
might have possessed and toward the manful achievement of their duty. And
this is what Congress did at this juncture. In view of the long, bitter
and disastrous strife between the two sets of industrial ideas and
interests in the republic, of the complex and earthquake circumstances and
conditions in which they were thrown in relation to each other at the
close of the rebellion, together with the imperious urgency for immediate
and decisive action on the part of the North, I confess that it is
extremely difficult to see even with the aid of hindsight what other
practicable course was then open to that section to pursue than the one
selected by Congress in the emergency as the best and wisest. And all
things considered, it was the best and wisest, which, when the present
generation of criticism and reaction has passed, will, I think, be so
adjudged by impartial truth.

Congress might at this juncture have led the country by another way out of
the perils which threatened afresh its peace and security, by a way
dreadful and inhuman, it is true, but which offered nevertheless a radical
and permanent cure for the evils which flow naturally from the union under
one general government of two mutually invasive and destructive industrial
systems, viz., by the forcible deportation of the entire black population
of the South, and the introduction into their stead of an equal number of
white immigrants. Such a course would have certainly achieved the
unification of the sections by the extinguishment and elimination of the
weaker of our two rival systems of labor. It was, however, a solution of
its Southern problem, which the nation was in morals, economics and
humanity precluded absolutely from adopting, for three simple and
sufficient reasons: First, for the sake of the South, which, wasted and
bewildered, lay sullen and prostrate amidst the wreck and chaos of civil
strife and at its lowest ebb of productive energy and wealth, its sole
recuperative chance depending on the labor of its former slaves. To deport
this labor, under the circumstances, would have been cruelly to deprive
that section of its last vital resource, and to sink it to a state of
industrial collapse and misery, by the side of which its condition at the
close of the war might have seemed prosperit