The Southern soil was at the moment broken up roughly by the hot ploughshare of civil war. It might have been better prepared for the reception of the good seed by the slower process of social evolution. But the guiding spirits of that era had no choice. The tide of an immense historic opportunity had risen. It was at its flood. Then was the accepted hour--then or never it appeared to them--and so they scattered broadcast seed ideas of the equality of all men before the law, their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the derivation of the powers of all just governments from the consent of the governed. These revolutionary ideas fell alongside of the uptorn but living roots of other and hostile political principles, and of the ramified and deep-growing prejudices of an old social order, and had forthwith to engage in a life and death struggle against tremendous odds for existence. Many there are who see in the reconstruction period nothing except the asserted incapacity of the Negro for self-government--nothing but carpet-bag rule and its attendant corruption. But bad as those governments were, they were, nevertheless, the actual vehicles which conveyed into the South the seeds of our industrial democracy and of a new social and political order. From that period dates the beginning of an absolutely new epoch for that section. The forces set free then in the old slave States have been gradually unfolding themselves amid giant difficulties ever since. They are, I believe, in the South to stay, and are destined ultimately to conquer every square inch of its mind and matter, and so to produce the perfect unification of the republic, by producing the perfect unification of its immense, heterogeneous population, regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude, on the broad basis of industrial and political equality and fair play.