rt, often of luxury--but I am surprised that the race did not
turn robbers and highwaymen, and, in turn, terrorize and rob society
as society had for so long terrorized and robbed them. The thing is
strange, marvelous, phenomenal in the extreme. Instead of becoming
outlaws, as the critical condition would seem to have indicated, the
black men of the South _went manfully to work_ to better their own
condition and the crippled condition of the country which had been
produced by the ravages of internecine rebellion; _while the white men
of the South, the capitalists, the land-sharks, the poor white trash,
and the nondescripts, with a thousand years of Christian civilization
and culture behind them, with "the boast of chivalry, the pomp of
power," these white scamps, who had imposed upon the world the idea
that they were paragons of virtue and the heaven-sent vicegerents of
civil power, organized themselves into a band of outlaws, whose
concatenative chain of auxiliaries ran through the entire South, and
deliberately proceeded to murder innocent men and women for POLITICAL
REASONS and to systematically rob them of their honest labor because
they were too accursedly lazy to labor themselves._

But this highly abnormal, unnatural condition of things is fast
passing away. The white man having asserted his superiority in the
matters of assassination and robbery, has settled down upon a barrel
of dynamite, as he did in the days of slavery, and will await the
explosion with the same fatuity and self-satisfaction true of him in
other days. But as convulsions from within are more violent and
destructive than convulsions from without, being more deepseated and
therefore more difficult to reach, the next explosion will be more
disastrous, more far-reaching in its havoc than the one which
metamorphosed social conditions in the South, and from the dreadful
reactions of which we are just now recovering.

As I have said elsewhere, the future struggle in the South will be,
not between white men and black men, but between capital and labor,
landlord and tenant. Already the cohorts are marshalling to the fray;
already the forces are mustering to the field at the sound of the
slogan.

The same battle will be fought upon Southern soil that is in
preparation in other states where the conditions are older in
development but no more deep-seated, no more pernicious, no more
blighting upon the industries of the country and the growth of the
pe