Daily national Republican. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1862-1866, 1865-10-26
WHERE WILL THE LABORERs
COME FROMto

The question standing above is on the lips
OF thousands of the anxious people of the
South, whose old labor system has been over.
thrown by the war of the rebellion "Where
will our laborers come from" they cry, as
if the issue of the war had paralyzed all the
muscle in the Southern States. Their fears
may be quieted if they will Danish from their
minds some of the dogmas which have been
the cause of all their troubles. They have
held and taught the dogma that where
labor was performed by black men
the white man could not work and
maintain his respectability This dogma
was preached all through the civil
lied world, and the slave-owners and
slave breeders did all in their power to en-
force it by ostracising white labor. Hence
their poor whites who were compelled to
work, were despised and those who went to
the slave States to seek homes went there
with the belief that they must preach, trade,
physic, pettifog, edit, traffic, fiddle, tend
monkey shows loaf, steal, get Office or do
something that negroes did not. Anything
but laboring in the fields, for that was the
degrading for white men or women They
were taught that the slave-owners were the
only respectable society, and it would not do
to lose caste with them.
And the new comers at the South, who
succeeded in obtaining positions there as
preachers, traders, physicians, pettifoggers,
editors, trafickers, monkey showmen loafers,
thieves, Ofice-hOlders, etc, straightway
preached the gospel of anti-labor even more
zealously than its authors, and indoctrinated
the world with it, in order to vindcate their
own title to respectability and gain admis-
sion to the order of the chvalry. But this
sort Of aristocracy has broken down.
Another dogma, invented to prop the one
we have mentioned, was, that the white man
could not work in the tropical regions of the
South, y as 1t was fashionable to call the more
Southern States But, in the first place,
they have no tropical regions they lie at Il
pleasant and comfortable distance north of
the tropics. And, secondly, the war set up
by them to support the institution Of slavery
and its dogmas-this one amongst the rest
has demonstrated that white men-both
those indigenous to the soil and those bred in
more northerly latitudes-can work severely
in the Southern States. The men in our ar
mics have carried muskets and digged en-
trenchpents in all kinds of Southern soil
and all sorts of weather; and if they can en-.
dure the climate under such circumstance,
it is idle to prate of the inability of the white
man to become practical agriculturist in
the South.
Yet another of the dogmas of slavery was
that the negro will not work in state OF
freedom. This is being disproved of eveR
day by the freedmen, and will be quite dis.
PEELED when the white people not only give
them the right sort Of teaching and encour-
agement, but also set them the right exam.
pie, which is to go to work Themselves That
will solve the queston-"Whcrc shall we
find laborers?' There arc probably twelve
millions Of able bodied men in the Southern
States, quite two-thirds of whom are white,
and now that white labor is becoming re-
speotable there, and the old lie of slavery
that white men can't labor there has been ex.
ploded, there will be an influx from abroad
that will not only supply all Deficiencies
bat increase the volume of industry nightly
81 shall II be.