To bring out the situation more clearly, suppose that instead of the eight millions of negroes now in the south we had eight millions of native white workers and no negroes at all. Would it not be far better for us of the section? Would it not be far better for the anti-monopoly cause in the north? Ought there not to be a real labor party in the south instead of what we now see? The so-called labor party of the south has a large percentage of leaders whose chief activity is to win positions in the unions, in agitation, in the city and State government wherein they can serve themselves by delivering the labor vote to corporate interests, or doing the latter legislative or official favor--a sure symptom that the movement is as yet merely incipient. In no northern State have the railroads and allied corporations such complete command of nominative, appointive, and legislative machinery as in Georgia; and it seems to me that Georgia is but fairly representative of all the south except South Carolina, which has advanced further in direct nomination than any other one of the United States. In many places the people of the north are successfully rising against the corporation oligarchs. In New York and Michigan the latter have been made to pay some of the taxes which they had always been dodging. In a recent Boston referendum the street railroad, which for years had ridden roughshod over the public at will, was snowed under, although it had the machine, all the five daily papers but one, and the outside of that, fighting for it with might and main. Los Angeles, followed by three or four other towns, has just made a beginning with the _Recall_. Oregon has direct legislation. Illinois has pushed ahead with both direct nomination and direct legislation. Cities here and there, in very grateful contrast with the apathy prevalent in this section, have awakened to the importance of rightly guarding the common property in public-service franchises. I could cite many other examples which show that the anti-plutocratic tide gathers force all over the north. Why is it that there is this blessed insurgence against corporation misrule there, and hardly a trace of it here? Simply because the north has and the south has not the motor of insurgence--a real labor class, growing steadily in zeal and organization, and rapidly increasing in numbers. That a southern State has no real labor class with potent influence upon the public, puts it as far behind the most enlightened communities in political and governmental condition, as it was with its slaves behind them in productive condition. Such a State lacks a most essential organ of the highest types of democracy.[141]