Wealth, unduly centralized, endangers the efficient workings of the
machinery of government. Land monopoly--in the hands of individuals,
corporations or syndicates--is at bottom the prime cause of the
inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to
vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one
family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by
machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a
tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of
human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers,
where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome
of all visitors.

The primal purpose in publishing this work is to show that the social
problems in the South are, in the main, the same as those which
afflict every civilized country on the globe; and that the future
conflict in that section will not be racial or political in character,
but between capital on the one hand and labor on the other, with the
odds largely in favor of nonproductive wealth because of the undue
advantage given the latter by the pernicious monopoly in land which
limits production and forces population disastrously upon subsistence.
My purpose is to show that poverty and misfortune make no invidious
distinctions of "race, color, or previous condition," but that wealth
unduly centralized oppresses all alike; therefore, that the labor
elements of the whole United States should sympathize with the same
elements in the South, and in some favorable contingency effect some
unity of organization and action, which shall subserve the common
interest of the common class.

T. THOMAS FORTUNE.