e part of the Negro to have what is denied him, but which others
enjoy, viz., free and equal opportunities in the rivalry of life. This
battle of ideas in the South is, in reality, a battle for the enduring
unification of the sections, the permanent pacification of the republic.
The labors of the fathers for a more perfect union will have been in vain
unless the Negro wins in this irrepressible conflict between the two
industrial systems of the country. It is greatly to be lamented that a
question of color and difference of race has so completely disabled the
nation and the South from seeing things relating to this momentous subject
clear, and seeing them straight. Those who see in this problem only a
conflict of races in the South see but a little way into its depths, for
underlying this conflict of races is a conflict of opposing ideas and
interests which have for a century vexed the peace of the nation. The
existence of a system of labor in the South distinct from that of the
North separated the two halves of the Union industrially, as far as the
East is from the West, made of them in truth two hostile nations, although
united under one general government. This difference has been the cause of
all the division and strife between the sections, and it will continue to
operate as such till completely abolished.

The clinging of the South, under the circumstances, to its old social and
political ideas and system, or to such fragments of them as now remain,
and its persistent attempts to put these broken parts together, and to
preserve thereby what so disastrously distinguishes it from the rest of
the country, is an economic error of the first magnitude--an error which
injuriously affects its own industrial prosperity and greatness by
retarding its material development and by infecting at the same time with
increasing unrest and discontent its faithful and peaceful black labor.
The fight which the South is making along this line is a fight not half so
much against the Negro as against its own highest good, and that of the
country's, for it has in this matter opposed itself ignorantly and madly
to the great laws which control the economic world, to the great laws
which are the soul of modern industrialism, laws which govern production
and exchange, consumption and competition, supply and demand, which
determine everywhere, between rival parts of the same country and between
rival nations as well, that commercial struggles, i