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
In order to avoid the inconveniency of such situations,
every prudent man in every period of society, after the
first establishment of the divisions of labor, must
naturally have endeavored to manage his affairs in such a
manner as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar
produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one
commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be
likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their
industry.
Labor is the one paramount force which develops the resources of the
world. It produces all the wealth; it pays, in the last analysis, all
the taxes--National, State and municipal; it produces the wealth which
sustains all the institutions of learning, as well as ministers to the
profligate luxuries of the idlers and sharpers who add nothing to the
wealth of society, but on the contrary constantly take from it, and
who have not inaptly been termed by Dr. Howard Crosby the "dangerous
classes;" it makes the wealth which gives a few men millions of
dollars as their share, either as rental or usurious interest upon
capital invested in the production of wealth; and it creates the vast
surplus which lies in the coffers of the Federal and State treasuries
of our land.
The producing agency, without which there could be no wealth; without
which the landlord could exact no rent and capital could draw no
interest, the producing agency alone receives an inadequate proportion
of the wealth it produces. The man who conducts any business requiring
labor and capital not only exacts an unjust proportion of the
laborer's hire, but takes more than he justly should as interest upon
his capital and as reward for his own time and labor, often amounting
to no trouble or labor, he delegating to other hands, such as foremen
or overseers, the absolute control of his investment. Yet, the man who
invests capital not only derives, in a majority of cases, a sufficient
income to enable him to live in more than comfort but to have a
healthy bank account; while the laborer, who alone makes capital draw
interest by giving it employment in developing the resources of
nature, derives only a bare subsistence, frequently not sufficient to
meet the absolute necessaries of his daily life. His wife and children
must be content with life simply--bare, cold life--often without any
of the conveniences or the commonest luxuries which make existence
anything more than the curse it is to a large majority of humankind.
This is peculiarly true of the condition of the masses of the Old
World, and is fast becoming true in our own young and vigorous
country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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