r, and the colonel, undismayed by his
temporary defeat, metaphorically girded up his loins, went home, and,
still metaphorically, set out to put a spoke in Fetters's wheel.

_Twenty-seven_

His first step was to have Caxton look up and abstract for him the
criminal laws of the State. They were bad enough, in all conscience.
Men could be tried without jury and condemned to infamous punishments,
involving stripes and chains, for misdemeanours which in more
enlightened States were punished with a small fine or brief detention.
There were, for instance, no degrees of larceny, and the heaviest
punishment might be inflicted, at the discretion of the judge, for the
least offense.

The vagrancy law, of which the colonel had had some experience, was an
open bid for injustice and "graft" and clearly designed to profit the
strong at the expense of the weak. The crop-lien laws were little more
than the instruments of organised robbery. To these laws the colonel
called the attention of some of his neighbours with whom he was on
terms of intimacy. The enlightened few had scarcely known of their
existence, and quite agreed that the laws were harsh and ought to be
changed.

But when the colonel, pursuing his inquiry, undertook to investigate
the operation of these laws, he found an appalling condition. The
statutes were mild and beneficent compared with the results obtained
under cover of them. Caxton spent several weeks about the State
looking up the criminal records, and following up the sentences
inflicted, working not merely for his fee, but sharing the colonel's
indignation at the state of things unearthed. Convict labour was
contracted out to private parties, with little or no effective State
supervision, on terms which, though exceedingly profitable to the
State, were disastrous to free competitive labour. More than one
lawmaker besides Fetters was numbered among these contractors.

Leaving the realm of crime, they found that on hundreds of farms,
ignorant Negroes, and sometimes poor whites, were held in bondage
under claims of debt, or under contracts of exclusive employment for
long terms of years--contracts extorted from ignorance by craft, aided
by State laws which made it a misdemeanour to employ such persons
elsewhere. Free men were worked side by side with convicts from the
penitentiary, and women and children herded with the most depraved
criminals, thus breeding a criminal class to prey upon the State.