This was the case in the early history of the colonies; and experience proved that an appeal to moral rectitude was unheard in Carolina when rice had become a great crop, and in Massachusetts when the rum-slave-traffic was paying a profit of 100%.
Du Bois emphasizes the historical challenges of appealing to moral values in the face of economic interests during the early colonial period.
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Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to…
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.