ause of the Industrial Revolution.

When now the Negro was freed the Philanthropists sought to apply to his
situation the Philosophy of Democracy handed down from the 18th century.

There was a chance here to try democratic rule in a new way, that is,
against the new industrial oppression with a mass of workers who were
not yet in its control. With plenty of land widely distributed, staple
products like cotton, rice, and sugar cane, and a thorough system of
education, there was a unique chance to realize a new modern democracy
in industry in the southern United States which would point the way to
the world. This, too, if done by black folk, would have tended to a new
unity of human beings and an obliteration of human hatreds festering
along the color line.

Efforts were begun. The 14th and 15th amendments gave the right to vote
to white and black laborers, and they immediately established a public
school system and began to attack the land question. The United States
government was seriously considering the distribution of land and
capital--"40 acres and a mule"--and the price of cotton opened an easy
way to economic independence. Co-operative movements began on a large
scale.

But alas! Not only were the former slave-owners solidly arrayed against
this experiment, but the owners of the industrial North saw disaster in
any such beginnings of industrial democracy. The opposition based its
objections on the color line, and Reconstruction became in history a
great movement for the self-assertion of the white race against the
impudent ambition of degraded blacks, instead of, in truth, the rise of
a mass of black and white laborers.

The result was the disfranchisement of the blacks of the South and a
world-wide attempt to restrict democratic development to white races and
to distract them with race hatred against the darker races. This
program, however, although it undoubtedly helped raise the scale of
white labor, in much greater proportion put wealth and power in the
hands of the great European Captains of Industry and made modern
industrial imperialism possible.

This led to renewed efforts on the part of white European workers to
understand and apply their political power to its reform through
democratic control.

Whether known as Communism or Socialism or what not, these efforts are
neither new nor strange nor terrible, but world-old and seeking an
absolutely justifiable human ideal--the only ideal that can be