For we must never forget that the economic system of the
South to-day which has succeeded the old regime is not the
same system as that of the old industrial North, of England,
or of France, with their trade-unions, their restrictive laws,
their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their
long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the
early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,--the En-
gland that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of
Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their
own petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has
passed to those men who have come to take charge of the
industrial exploitation of the New South,--the sons of poor
whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty
and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into
the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and
black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers
as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love
nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question
of dollars and dividends.
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