But this is not the need of the revolution nor indeed, perhaps, its real beginning.  What we must decide sometime is who are to be considered “men.”  Today, at the beginning of this industrial change, we are admitting that economic classes must give way.  The laborers’ hire must increase, the employers’ profit must be curbed.  But how far shall this change go?  Must it apply to all human beings and to all work throughout the world?

Certainly not.  We seek to apply it slowly and with some reluctance to white men and more slowly and with greater reserve to white women, but black folk and brown and for the most part yellow folk we have widely determined shall not be among those whose needs must justly be heard and whose wants must be ministered to in the great organization of world industry.

In the teaching of my classes I was not willing to stop with showing that this was unfair,—­indeed I did not have to do this.  They knew through bitter experience its rank injustice, because they were black.  What I had to show was that no real reorganization of industry could be permanently made with the majority of mankind left out.  These disinherited darker peoples must either share in the future industrial democracy or overturn the world.

Of course, the foundation of such a system must be a high, ethical ideal.  We must really envisage the wants of humanity.  We must want the wants of all men.  We must get rid of the fascination for exclusiveness.  Here, in a world full of folk, men are lonely.  The rich are lonely.  We are all frantic for fellow-souls, yet we shut souls out and bar the ways and bolster up the fiction of the Elect and the Superior when the great mass of men is capable of producing larger and larger numbers for every human height of attainment.  To be sure, there are differences between men and groups and there will ever be, but they will be differences of beauty and genius and of interest and not necessarily of ugliness, imbecility, and hatred.

The meaning of America is the beginning of the discovery of the Crowd.  The crowd is not so well-trained as a Versailles garden party of Louis XIV, but it is far better trained than the Sans-culottes and it has infinite possibilities.  What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!

What hinders our approach to the ideals outlined above?  Our profit from degradation, our colonial exploitation, our American attitude toward the Negro.  Think again of East St. Louis!  Think back of that to slavery and Reconstruction!  Do we want the wants of American Negroes satisfied?  Most certainly not, and that negative is the greatest hindrance today to the reorganization of work and redistribution of wealth, not only in America, but in the world.