I have now to do with a still greater evil as part of the curse of slavery to the southern whites; which is, that it prevented the normal rise in the section of a white labor class. If one but look steadily at developments, either now in progress or surely impending, in Germany, France, England, the English colonies, and the United States he sees that the workers most of all are influencing the other classes to pursue the best policy in all departments of government. The truth is that in every stage of society there is the leading energy of some particular class. Let me make you reflect over a few well-known examples. In their unremitted struggle with the patricians, the plebeians of Rome gradually climbed out of their low estate into complete political, civil, and social equality with the former who had long been the constituency of the so-called republic. Some centuries later a tacit combination of those belonging to each division of the middle class dried all the fountains of civil disorder and made domestic peace sure and permanent by establishing the Roman empire. Much later employers of the free labor which had displaced slavery made European towns democratic, and set them in such strong array against the feudal barons that the latter were at last restrained from plundering the new industry. The American revolution and the French revolution were each mainly middle-class movements. By them the middle class cleared out of its way, as far as it could, distinctions of birth, title, rank, and all other special personal privileges. But, unawares, it put in the place of the old hereditary lords and monopolists, known as such by everybody, a nobility in disguise. The members of this nobility make no claim to our labor or substance by reason of their having had such and such fathers or having received such and such grants or patents to themselves as natural persons. They pose as government agents in such functions as the transportation and monetary, of which efficient, cheap, and impartial performance is vital to the general welfare. Clandestinely they have had the law of the land made or interpreted and the practice of government shaped each as they want it; and sitting in their masks wherever these sovereign powers must be invoked by producer or worker, it is these usurpers and not the legitimate public authorities who must be applied to and given, not the just cost of the service, but the supreme extortion possible. These masked rulers toll our wages, profits, and property as insidiously and deeply as does indirect compared with direct taxation. In fact they are government licensees, levying upon us for their own benefit all the indirect taxation that we can bear. Some--I may say, a large number--of middle-class property owners and producers are heart and soul in strong and strengthening resistance now forming against the tyrants they have unwittingly set up. But the initiative and most effective elements of this benign uprising do not come