As the whites could not now reestablish constitutionally their old slave system, or directly their new serf system they proceeded to do the next best thing, that is to construct a caste system based on race and color.
Grimké describes the establishment of a racial caste system as a response to the abolition of slavery.
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And politics is business, is the big business is it not, or ought it not to be the big business of all self governing peoples, who would maintain justice and freedom for themselves and transmit them unimpaired to their posterity?
There must be added to them this something else, this one thing needful to render them effective to save the blacks from the evil consequences of their race ignorance, and the whites from the evil consequences of their race prejudice.
And this one thing needful, I believe, the Progressive Party brings to the solution of the problem, and that it formed the underlying motive and the statesmanlike purpose of the action at Chicago last August of Theodore Roosevelt.
Such a proposition, the Republican Party is incapable of making for reasons already pointed out, and the Democratic Party for other and obvious reasons is precluded from offering.