The Fire in the Flint by Walter White

Early the next morning Kenneth rose and rummaged through his books until he found his old and battered textbooks on economics.

Into these he dipped during the intervals between patients, making notes of ideas which seemed useful in the organization of the cooperative society. The more he read, the more feasible the plan seemed. Properly guided and carefully managed, there was no reason, so far as he could see, why the society should not be a success. Eighty percent of the farmers of the South, white and coloured, he estimated, suffered directly or indirectly from the present economic system. Though his interest was in the Negro tillers of the soil, success in their case would inevitably react favourably on the white just as oppression and exploitation of the Negro had done more harm to white people in the South than to Negroes. Kenneth felt the warm glow of the crusader in a righteous cause. Already he saw a new day in the South with white and coloured people free from oppression and hatred and prejudice -- prosperous and contented because of that prosperity. He could see a lifting of the clouds of ignorance which hung over all the South, an awakening of the best in all the people of the South. Thus has youth dreamed since the beginning of time. Thus will youth ever dream. And in those dreams rests the hope of the world, for without them this world with all its defects would sink into the black abyss of despair, never to rise again.