Notes from Wikiquote
Compare to, e.g. | The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law. ... In this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of building a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy. | W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 714