What is that tremendous system of production, organization and struggleknown as modern industrialism going to do with the Negroes of the UnitedStates? Passing into its huge hopper and between its upper and nethermillstones, are they to come out grist for the nation, or mere chaff,doomed like the Indian to ultimate extinction in the raging fires ofracial and industrial rivalry and progress? Sphinx’s riddle, say you,which yet awaits its Oedipus? Perhaps, though an examination of the pastmay show us that the riddle is not awaiting its Oedipus so much as hisanswer, which he has been writing slowly, word by word, and inexorably, inthe social evolution of the republic for a century, and is writing still.If we succeed in reading aright what has already been inscribed by thatiron pen, may we not guess the remainder, and so catch from afar thefateful answer? Possibly. Then let us try.
With unequaled sagacity the founders of the American Republic reared,without prototype or precedent, its solid walls and stately columns on thebroad basis of human equality, and of certain inalienable rights, such aslife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to which they declared all menentitled. Deep they sunk their foundation piles on the consent of thegoverned, and committed fearlessly, sublimely, the new state to thepeople. But there was an exception, and on this exception hangs our tale,and turns the dark drama of our national history.
Those founders had to deal with many novel and perplexing problems ofconstruction, but none seemed so difficult to handle as were those whichgrew out of the presence of African slavery, as an industrial system, inseveral of the States. At the threshold of national existence these menwere constrained by circumstances to make an exception to the primaryprinciples which they had placed at the bottom of their untried and boldexperiment in popular government. This sacrifice of fundamental truthcarried along with it one of the sternest retributions of history. For itinvolved the admission on equal footing into the Union of a fundamentalerror in ethics and economics, with which our new industrial democracy wasforced presently to engage in deadly strife for existence andsurvivorship.
The American fathers were, undoubtedly, aware of the misfortune ofadmitting under one general government, and on terms of equality, twomutually invasive and destructive social ideas and their correspondingsystems of labor. But they were baffled at the time by what appeared to bea political necessity, and so met the grand emergency of the age byconcession and a spirit of conciliation. Many of them, indeed, desired oneconomic as well as on moral[Pg 4] grounds the abolition of slavery, andprobably felt the more disposed to compromise with the evil in the generalconfidence with which they regarded its early and ultimate extinction.
This humane expectation of the young republic failed of realization, owingprimarily and chiefly, I think, to the potent influence upon theinstitution of slavery of certain labor-saving inventions and theirindustrial application in England and America during the last quarter ofthe eighteenth century. These epoch-making inventions were the spinningjenny of Hargreaves, the spinning machine of Arkwright and the mule ofCrompton, in combi