the slower process of social evolution. But
the guiding spirits of that era had no choice. The tide of an immense
historic opportunity had risen. It was at its flood. Then was the accepted
hour--then or never it appeared to them--and so they scattered broadcast
seed ideas of the equality of all men before the law, their inalienable
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the derivation of
the powers of all just governments from the consent of the governed. These
revolutionary ideas fell alongside of the uptorn but living roots of other
and hostile political principles, and of the ramified and deep-growing
prejudices of an old social order, and had forthwith to engage in a life
and death struggle against tremendous odds for existence. Many there are
who see in the reconstruction period nothing except the asserted
incapacity of the Negro for self-government--nothing but carpet-bag rule
and its attendant corruption. But bad as those governments were, they
were, nevertheless, the actual vehicles which conveyed into the South the
seeds of our industrial democracy and of a new social and political order.
From that period dates the beginning of an absolutely new epoch for that
section. The forces set free then in the old slave States have been
gradually unfolding themselves amid giant difficulties ever since. They
are, I believe, in the South to stay, and are destined ultimately to
conquer every square inch of its mind and matter, and so to produce the
perfect unification of the republic, by producing the perfect unification
of its immense, heterogeneous population, regardless of race, color or
previous condition of servitude, on the broad basis of industrial and
political equality and fair play.

The contest of the old industrial rivals has, in consequence of this
influx of democratic ideas into the South, and the resultant modification
of environment there, taken on fresh and deplorable complications. The
struggle between the old and the new which is in progress throughout that
section is no longer a simple conflict between the two sets of industrial
principles of the Union along sectional lines, as formerly, but along race
lines now as well. The self-evident truths of the Declaration of
Independence invading the old slave States have divided that house against
itself. Their powerful ally, popular education, is creating everywhere
moral unrest and discontent with present injustices and a growing desire
on th