A few figures will help your understanding of the case. In twenty-one years this society has spent $5,543,636.03—a yearly average of $263,772.19. In seventeen years, from 1863 to 1880, from not owning a single dollar’s worth of property of any sort available for taxation, these people have come to hold property taxed for $100,000,000, as appears from Southern tax-bills, which show no respect of color—an average rate of increase from nothing, of $5,882,352.94 a year. This is a yearly increase greater than the whole amount spent by this society. That is, this society has spent $1, and these people, from absolute pauperism, have come into possession of over $21 of taxable property. These facts answer the question whether the colored man can take care of himself, and show that the labors of this society have a cash value which can easily be computed. There is still another phase of the cash value of the labors of this society, as related to the productive wealth of the country. Here this society touches and increases our material prosperity. I refer to a more equable distribution of ownership in the soil. Surely no one can deny that to change five or six millions of people from paupers to property-holders, produces a very material effect upon the prosperity of the State. I believe that it is a settled canon of political economy that a nation’s wealth is in its soil. Where there are but few land-owners, and the tillers of the soil are tenants, wealth must be in the hands of the few, and comparative if not absolute poverty in the hands of the many. To this state of things belong social classes, as widely separated from each other as continents. It goes without saying that landed monopoly and general prosperity of the people do not go together. I am no advocate of communism; but I take the ground, and I believe it can be held, that the same amount of property, somewhat evenly distributed among the people of a country, adds more to its actual productive wealth and material prosperity, than the same amount of money would do, held in the hands of a few, who constitute an aristocracy of wealth and of blood. Of course, in every state, some men must be vastly more wealthy than others. But a comfortable competence in one’s hands makes him entirely independent of his more wealthy neighbor.