to work
in a phosphate mine.[81] It is an easy matter to get working men in
debt. Many thousand rural justices keeping no records of convictions,
hundreds of constables with fees depending on convictions, scores of
petty crimes with penalties not usually enforced, contractors and
planters eager for labor at the convict's rating of 35 cents a
day--neither the negro nor the poor white is safe. Immigrants avoid a
country with such a record. Not only the dread of forced labor for
themselves but the dread of competition with the low wages that the
forced labor of others implies, keep the immigrants away from the South.
The fame of peonage is spread among them before they leave their native
land. The business that rests on coerced labor damages the whole
community for its own temporary gain. The right to quit work is as
sacred for the workman as the right to enforce contracts for the
capitalist. It is just as necessary to get energetic labor as it is to
get abundant capital to embark in business. By recognizing the right of
workmen to violate contracts, the employer learns to content himself
with contracts that will not hurt when violated. He learns to appeal to
the workman's motive to industry by methods that are not coercive.
Admitting that the bulk of what is said about the negro's fickleness is
true, he nevertheless is indiscriminately maligned. The thousands that
are unreliable furnish a cloak for suppressing the hundreds that are
industrious. I have made comparisons of the pay-rolls of two gas works
in Southern cities--the one employing negro stokers at 11 cents an hour,
the other whites at 22 cents an hour, and both working 12 hours a day
seven days a week. The negroes put in as many hours between pay-days as
did the whites, and if they "laid off" after pay-day it is no more than
any class of white workmen would do after two weeks of such exhausting
work. The negro in Southern cities can scarcely hope to rise above 12
cents an hour, and white mechanics have a way of working with negro
helpers at 10 cents an hour in order to lift their own wages to 20 cents
an hour. White wage-earners and white employers in the South speak of
the negroes' efforts to get higher wages in the same words and tones as
employers in the North speak of white wage-earners who have organized
unions and demanded more pay. A foreman condemned his "niggers" for
instability when they were leaving him at 10 cents an hour for a
railroad job at 12-1/2 ce