The Two Aristocracies of America [pp. 461-465]

THE TWO ARISTOCRACIES OF AMERICA.
He does not understand political economy, could not for his
life pronounce the words, but feels that the laws of free competition and demand and supply operate as a bitter mockery
and crying injustice, and would often starve him, not because
his labor was intrinsically less valuable, but because labor was
more abundant. When labor ceases to be sufficiently remunerative, white laborers hold meetings, publish windy preambles
and resolutions, enter into Trades' Unions, and have strikes.
On such occasions negroes will fight outright, seeing no other
exodus from their difficulties. We see no better prospect in
the future, at least in all of our towns and cities, than a perpetually recurring war of the races. The Southern aristocracy is
asphyxiated, if not defunct.
Whilst the chivalry of the North and of Europe, essentially
aided by the negroes, were scotching the Southern Hydra, a
monster ten times more terrible grew up at the North-East,
more rapidly and in grander proportion than'Jack's Bean.'
The moneyed power,
"Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens, cui lumen ademptum,"
appeared upon the political arena. A monster, unprincipled,
rapacious, cruel, exacting, vulgar, thievish, omnipresent, and
almost omnipotent. Now domestic slavery is abolished, and
there is no political slavery in America-but slavery to capital
such as never existed anywhere in this world before, is grinding down into the dust every laboring man in America. If
you doubt it, calculate your taxes, and compare them with the
taxes you paid before the war. Are they not ten times as
great? Or go to a store and buy the necessaries of life, do
they not cost twice as much? If you be a laborer, have your
wages risen proportionally? Certainly not! Fifty per cent.,
in bad money, has been added, perhaps, to your wages, and a
hundred per cent. to your expenses. And for whose benefit?
Certainly not for that of the Government, or of the people at
large, and as certainly for the benefit of the vulgar, vicious,
parvenu moneyed aristocracy, that, mushroom-like, have grown
up out of the ruin of both North and South. The Federal Government has become a mere agent to collect interest for the
Government creditors, and to enact protective tariffs to increase
the profits of North-Eastern manufacturers. Politically we are
free, but the moneyed aristocracy of the North-East lords it
over us of the South and of the North-West, and, indeed, of the
whole agricultural and laboring interest, wherever situated,
with ten times the cruelty, and twenty times the rapacity, that
ever Imperial Russia lorded it over abjectly enslaved Poland.
This new aristocracy that has arisen on the ruins of the slave
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