The reconstruction government has purposely demoralized the economic conditions which contributed to the prosperity of the South. Full well it knew that the wealth of the people depended upon their labor. There was a time when plunder was the great resource of the nations of the earth. The first kingdom was sustained by pillage and conquest, and great Babylon, the glory of the Chaldean empire, was adorned by the spoils of all Asia; the Assyrian was plundered by the Persian, the Persian by the Macedonian, and it at last devoured by the Roman power. The wolf which nursed its founder, gave a hunger for prey insatiable to the whole world. There was not a temple nor a shrine between the Euphrates and the salted sea that was not pillaged by these marauders. The tide of ages, century after century, had rolled over the last fragment of Roman power; the light of science had broken upon the world, before mankind seemed to realize that our Creator, dead aeons ago had said: 'By the sweat of his brow man should eat his bread all the days of his life.' Wealth is power, and the wealth of a nation is its labor, its abundant control of all the great agencies of nature employed in production. The products of human labor, its food and clothing, like the fruits of the earth are annual, and God in his wisdom has adjusted human wants to their power of production. Like the bread from heaven the dews of every night produce the crops, and the labors of every day gather the harvest. What, but an almost boundless power of consumption and reproduction has given to the South its athletic vigor, and yet the enfranchisement of the negroes has been a fatal blow to every industrial interest. It has left our plows to rot in the furrow, and our plantations to grow up in briers and brambles. That liberty, which ranks in our organic law next to life, is subjected to the caprice of those who happen in the ever varying conditions of human affairs to be placed over us as masters. The South believed that the theory of the government derived its chiefest captivation from its regard to the equal rights of all its citizens and from its pledge to maintain and preserve those rights. It assumed to proclaim the happiness of the people to have been the object of its institution, and to guarantee to each and to all without limitation the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. It has been reserved for the power of oppression, in its active and diffused state, to give effect to the unhallowed innovation upon the rights of the South. Reconstruction is the Gethsemane of southern life. God's law is higher than man's law. Man's feeble statutes cannot annul the immutable ordinances of the Almighty. Those whom God has put asunder, let no man join together.