Only the moral sense of a community can keep helpless labor from sinking to this level; and when a community has once been debauched by slavery, its moral sense offers little resistance to economic demand.
Du Bois emphasizes the importance of a community's moral sense in preventing exploitation and the degradation of labor.
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Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.
Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.