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
There is death in the theory; death to our own people and death to the
people with whom we compete. When a people no longer produce those
articles which are absolutely necessary to sustain life the days of
such people may be easily calculated.
Men talk daily of "over production," of "glutted markets," and the
like; but such is not a true statement of the case. There can be no
over production of anything as long as there are hungry mouths to be
fed. It does not matter if the possessors of these hungry mouths are
too poor to buy the bread; if they are hungry, there is no
overproduction. With a balance of $150,000,000 of trade; with
plethoric granaries and elevators all over the land; with millions of
swine, sheep and cattle on a thousand hills; with millions of surplus
revenue in the vaults of the National treasury, diverted from the
regular channels of trade by an ignorant set of legislators who have
not gumption enough to reduce unnecessary and burdensome taxation
without upsetting the industries of the country--with all its
grandiloquent exhibition of happiness and prosperity, the laboring
classes of the country starve to death, or eke out an existence still
more horrible.
The factories of the land run on half time, and the men, women and
children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from
insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud
of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding
pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to
satisfy the exactions of the landlord--a monstrosity in the midst of
civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our
pretensions to civilization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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