The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, "content themselves with the place of inferiority." The essential feature of the history of the last five years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman (half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller, Harriman, Morgan. So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class. It does it by the purchase at elections in one form or another of its "poor whites" and its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by legislation, the North is doing it by cash. _The Question We Are Coming To_ I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the entrenched privilege of those in control. We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom in the North? How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich criminal into jail in the North! In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every crisis of the world's history: "What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews, Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?" CHAPTER XIII THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP "Democracy is the progress of all through all, under the leadership of the best and the wisest."--_Mazzini._ In former chapters I have had much to tell that was unpleasant and perhaps discouraging; but it had to be told, for it is there, and must be honestly met and reckoned with.