W.E.B. Du Bois: “Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a fierce gleam of world-hate.”

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.