hus in all its hideousness
developed the convict lease system.

This institution and the accompanying chain-gang were at variance with
all the humanitarian impulses of the nineteenth century. Sometimes
prisoners were worked in remote parts of a state altogether away from
the oversight of responsible officials; if they stayed in a prison the
department for women was frequently in plain view and hearing of
the male convicts, and the number of cubic feet in a cell was only
one-fourth of what a scientific test would have required. Sometimes
there was no place for the dressing of the dead except in the presence
of the living. The system was worst when the lessee was given the entire
charge of the custody and discipline of the convicts, and even of their
medical or surgical care. Of real attention there frequently was none,
and reports had numerous blank spaces to indicate deaths from unknown
causes. The sturdiest man could hardly survive such conditions for more
than ten years. In Alabama in 1880 only three of the convicts had been
in confinement for eight years, and only one for nine. In Texas, from
1875 to 1880, the total number of prisoners discharged was 1651, while
the number of deaths and escapes for the same period totalled 1608. In
North Carolina the mortality was eight times as great as in Sing Sing.

At last the conscience of the nation began to be heard, and after 1883
there were remedial measures. However, the care of the prisoner still
left much to be desired; and as the Negro is greatly in the majority
among prisoners in the South, and as he is still sometimes arrested
illegally or on flimsy pretexts, the whole matter of judicial and penal
procedure becomes one of the first points of consideration in any final
settlement of the Negro Problem.[1]

[Footnote 1: Within recent years it has been thought that the convict
lease system and peonage had practically passed in the South. That this
was by no means the case was shown by the astonishing revelations from
Jasper County, Georgia, early in 1921, it being demonstrated in court
that a white farmer, John S. Williams, who had "bought out" Negroes from
the prisons of Atlanta and Macon, had not only held these people in
peonage, but had been directly responsible for the killing of not less
than eleven of them.

However, as the present work passes through the press, word comes of the
remarkable efforts of Governor Hugh M. Dorsey for a more enlightened
public conscie