o intend in these imperfect remarks
to try to indicate in outline merely the dismal stream of these causes
during the last half century, hoping thereby to cast a little light on a
dark and difficult subject: namely, how out of hostile and unequal social,
industrial and political conditions Negro crime emerged and why Negro
criminals abound.

To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances--that
they are the products of their social heredity and environment--is to
state a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It is
therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in
the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery.
For it furnished for two and a half centuries both his social heredity and
his environment, and so shaped his growth and character along moral,
religious and industrial lines. Chattel slaves had no rights, the most
rudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect. They did
not, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership of
self and of the products of their labor. They were the legal property of
others and so were the products of their labor. They did not own the
cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or the
tools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank or
the bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did the
cattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds and
bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or
to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the
masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves
were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of
wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit
of happiness. Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and
moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over
the souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bred
apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and
fear--the black brood of man's inhumanity to man.

At the close of the war which destroyed slavery the two races emerged
together into the midst of vast changes. The old social structure had been
disrupted in the civil convulsion, and the old political order likewise.
The slave half of the nat