The South cannot, economically, eat its cake and have it too. It cannot adopt a policy and a code of laws to degrade its Negro labor, to hedge it about with unequal restrictions and prescriptive legislation, and raise it at the same time to the highest state of productive efficiency. But it must as an economic necessity raise this labor to the highest point of efficiency or suffer inevitable industrial feebleness and inferiority. What are the things which have made free labor at the North the most productive labor in the world and of untold value and wealth to that section? What, but its intelligence, skill, self-reliance and power of initiative? And how have these qualities been put into it? I answer unhesitatingly, by those twin systems of universal education and popular suffrage. One system trains the children, the other the adult population. The same wide diffusion of knowledge, and large and equal freedom and participation in the affairs of government, which have done so much for Northern labor, cannot possibly do less for Southern labor. For weal or woe the Negro is in the South to stay. He will never leave it voluntarily, and forcible deportation of him is impracticable. And for economic reasons, vital to that section, as we have seen, he must not be oppressed or repressed. All attempts to push and tie him down to the dead level of an inferior caste, to restrict his activities arbitrarily and permanently to hewing wood and drawing water for the white race, without regard to his possibilities for higher things, is in this age of strenuous industrial competition and struggle an economic blunder, pure and simple, to say nothing of the immorality of such action. Like water, let the Negro find his natural level, if the South would get the best and the most out of him. If nature has designed him to serve the white race forever, never fear. He will not be able to elude nature; he will not escape his destiny. But he must be allowed to act freely; nature does not need our aid here. Depend upon it, she will make no mistake. Her inexorable laws provide for the survival of the fittest only. Let the Negro freely find himself, whether in doing so he falls or rises in the scale of life.