Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the SouthFortune, Timothy Thomas
History
Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South
Fortune, Timothy Thomas
African Americans -- Southern States; Southern States -- Economic conditions; United States -- Race relations
so enormous that solicitude on his part for one that falls by the
wayside would be a gratuitous expenditure of humanity and charity
which the world is too intensely selfish and materialistic to expect
him. Here he forges wealth and death at one and the same time. He
could not do this if our social system did not confer upon him a
monopoly of the soil from which subsistence must be derived, because
the industrial slave, given an equal opportunity to produce for
himself, would not produce for another. On the other hand the large
industrial operations, with the multitude of laborers from which Adam
Smith declares employers grow rich, as far as this applies to the
soil, would not be possible, since the vast volume of increased
production brought about by the industry of the multitude of co-equal
small farmers would so reduce the cost price of food products as to
destroy the incentive to speculation in them, and at the same time
utterly destroy the necessity or the possibility of famines, such as
those which have from time to time come upon the Irish people. There
could be no famine, in the natural course of things, where all had an
opportunity to cultivate as much land as they could wherever they
found any not already under cultivation by some one else. It needs no
stretch of the imagination to see what a startling tendency the
announcement that all vacant land was free to settlement upon
condition of cultivation would have to the depopulation of
over-crowded cities like New York, Baltimore and Savannah, where the
so-called pressure of population upon subsistence has produced a
hand-to-hand fight for existence by the wage-workers in every avenue
of industry.
This is no fancy picture. It is a plain, logical deduction of what
would result from the restoration to the people of that equal chance
in the race of life which every man has a right to expect, to demand,
and to exact as a condition of his membership of organized society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account