an overseer. We are, of course,
speaking of the mass of the people, in their natural state, before any
enlightenment gained by contact with more civilized races. The whole
question is discussed on its broadest lines by Mr. Meredith Townsend
in his luminous work, "Asia and Europe." He seems hopelessly to
conclude that there is no possibility of white and black permanently
living together as part of one industrial civilization unless the
latter race is definitely under the orders of the former. Without
assenting to this view it may be admitted that it is one which has
very largely prevailed in the Southern States, and the difficulty
there is, of course, with agricultural labor. So fast as the negro can
be made a peasant proprietor, the question seems to be in a measure
solved; but it is alleged to be almost impossible to get the necessary
labor from negroes when done for others, under contract or otherwise.
There is, therefore, a mass of recent legislation in the Southern
States which we may entitle the _peonage_ laws, which range from the
highly objectionable and unconstitutional statute compelling a person
to carry out his contract of labor under penalty as for a misdemeanor,
to the more ingenious statutes which get at the same result by the
indirect means of declaring a person guilty of breaking a contract
under which he has acquired money or supplies punishable as for fraud.
There are also statutes applying and very greatly extending the old
common-law doctrine of loss of service; making it highly criminal for
a neighbor to incite a servant or employee to break his contract or
even to accept the work of a laborer without ascertaining that he
has not broken such contract, as, for instance, by a certificate of
discharge from his last master. These laws, it will be seen, differ in
no particular from the early labor laws in England, which we carefully
summarized for this purpose; except, indeed, that they do stop short
of the old English legislation which provided that when a laborer
broke his contract or refused to work he could be committed before the
nearest magistrate and summarily punished. Even this result, however,
has been arrived at by the more circuitous and ingenious legislation
of Southern States such as in Georgia, cited in the charge to the
Grand Jury.[1] The principle of this elaborate machinery is always
that money advances, or supplies, or a lease of a farm for a season
or more, or the loan of a mule, hav