Our American civilization has received during these three hundred years two crushing blows. So staggering have been these onslaughts that it is still doubtful whether or not we can recover and go on as a democratic people. On both occasions the blows have come primarily from a relatively small group of profiteers. During the first two hundred years of our history the African slave traders of old England and New England traded their vile cargoes of rum for the black man, and sold him throughout the Americas. So they accursed half our country with slavery. To-day their deeds remain in the form of a large population of black people, which, like a millstone about its neck, still drags upon every natural aspiration of the Southland. The desire for cheap labor was not fully satiated through the importation of the African slave. The coming of modern industrialism gave it a new turn. Our American system of industrialism has been based, from the first, largely upon a European system of labor. Without the slightest question as to their unfitness to take part in our social life, or our political democracy, without thought of anything in the world but securing much labor for little money, our employing classes have, until very recently, persuaded the nation to give them a free hand in their immigration policy. What the importation of the black man did to the South in accursing our history for centuries, immigration has done and is still doing to the industrial districts of the North and West. Having advanced far beyond Europe in the development of a democratic civilization, we have now again, deliberately, turned back upon our past and prevented the social, intellectual and political progress of our country by instituting the conditions of a degrading poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, slums, and mediaeval religious worship. The gang rule and the boss rule of our cities are simply a return to monarchical forms without the decencies of government and the refinements of society which an hereditary monarch provides. All this we have gotten together with the riches we so much craved. We have amassed our wealth only to realize, perhaps too late, that our very food and drink are ashes and vinegar.