In discussing the political and industrial problems of the South, Ibase my conclusions upon a personal knowledge of the condition ofclasses in the South, as well as upon the ample data furnished bywriters who have pursued, in their way, the question before me. Thatthe colored people of the country will yet achieve an honorable statusin the national industries of thought and activity, I believe, and tryto make plain.
In discussion of the land and labor problem I but pursue the theoriesadvocated by more able and experienced men, in the attempt to showthat the laboring classes of any country pay all the taxes, in thelast analysis, and that they are systematically victimized bylegislators, corporations and syndicates.
Wealth, unduly centralized, endangers the efficient workings of themachinery of government. Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals,corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of theinequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over tovast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not onefamily finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted bymachinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into atenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands ofhuman beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers,where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcomeof all visitors.
The primal purpose in publishing this work is to show that the socialproblems in the South are, in the main, the same as those whichafflict every civilized country on the globe; and that the futureconflict in that section will not be racial or political in character,but between capital on the one hand and labor on the other, with theodds largely in favor of nonproductive wealth because of the undueadvantage given the latter by the pernicious monopoly in land whichlimits production and forces population disastrously upon subsistence.My purpose is to show that poverty and misfortune make no invidiousdistinctions of "race, color, or previous condition," but that wealthunduly centralized oppresses all alike; therefore, that the laborelements of the whole United States should sympathize with the sameelements in the South, and in some favorable contingency effect someunity of organization and action, which shall subserve the commoninterest of the common class.
New York City, July 20, 1884.