The people of Alabama were plunged into the bloody, surging sea of trouble in the sixties by the same extremist element in the South, which has more than once ruled more desperately than wisely, and is, in times of great emergency, scarcely conservative or sensible. The writer often imagines he can hear some of these same old blustering members of the ex-slave- and present office-holding hierarchy exciting the common people back before the sixties with their now “moss-covered” harangues, and wonders if some of the common herd could again be herded by these same herdsmen and be driven into another conflict of “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”

If it had not been for the rash domination of this “rule or ruin” element in the South at that time, there is no doubt but that “the war between the States” could have been averted, with far greater advantage to the people of this section.

The masses of the people of Alabama were not at heart secessionists, but it is, as heretofore, unwritten truth that this state was seceded fraudulently by the original “machine bosses” who dictated the seating of the delegates in the “secession convention,” and who ruthlessly sacrificed the lives and property of the poor in a vain endeavor to add to the coffers of the rich landlord by further enslaving humanity.

Reformers in Alabama are to-day fought hardest and persecuted most by the sons of the class of men who fought the poor white man during the late war and spoliated his meagre possessions, in order that the shackles might be kept on the ankles of the black man so the rich landlord could prolong his princely ways. Opposing the present movement for universal industrial freedom are represented those who have strangled Liberty at every stage of her growth, and who respect the needs of the poor white man now, as little as they did the wants of the poor slaves then.The common people always fight all the battles in times of war, create all the wealth in periods of peace; but, whether in the battle of blood or the struggle for bread, they have never reaped a substantial benefit from either contest. They have been engaged in a prolonged, though varying struggle, all down the history of the ages, and greed and avarice have always sapped their energies and sucked their life-blood.

Such is truly a too real recital of the actual experience of the Alabama citizen ex-soldier, as he now is in the ranks of “the common masses of the common people,” battling for bread with about as much hope of reaping a happy reward in this contest, as he had of winning a soul-swelling victory in that of the sixties. How sad is the narrative of the real life of the average Alabamian, who has always been loyal to the political leaders of his native state, worshiping even at the shrine of the name “Democracy,” but, after years of toil, privation and endurance, approaches the verge of eternity unable to bequeath a heritage of neither full-fledged liberty nor free-titled land to uneducated, homeless and hopeless children.