suits against large corporations,
and has been generally successful. He has also been retained
in many equity, real estate and contested will cases,
wherein he has been equally successful. He has been almost
exclusively engaged in civil practice during his experience
of fourteen years as a practitioner before the Supreme Court
of the District.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith are domiciled at No. 715 Second Street,
Northwest, where they have resided for the past twenty
years. Two children survive to them: Master Jerome
Bonaparte, a student at Howard University and Miss Rosa
Virginia, a pupil in the Washington High School.

At first glance the above question would seem to be fully answered
with one word comprising but two letters, namely, N-o. And yet, upon
second thought, it will be seen that that answer would not apply, for
the reason that the alleged criminal Negro seldom reaches a
court-house in the South before alleged summary justice is visited
upon him by an unreasoning Judge Lynch.

The fact that the question is asked whether the criminal Negro is
justly dealt with in the courts of the South, would imply that there
is at least a doubt as to the genuineness of the justice meted out to
him there. In legal phraseology, a criminal is one who has been duly
convicted of crime. This being so, it would seem that my first inquiry
should be, whether the Negro who has been legally ascertained to be a
criminal is justly dealt with in the South, in the matter of his
punishment therefor? This line of inquiry leads me into the
investigation of the convict lease system which obtains in certain
Southern states, and other unlawful abuses of colored criminals there.

It is not my purpose in the limited space allotted to consider this
phase of the subject at great length, but rather to briefly point out
its manifest injustice.

One of the greatest wrongs of the South is its convict lease system;
and its lynch law, and its disfranchising statutes are like unto it.
Although the emancipation proclamation, written and promulgated by the
immortal Lincoln, has been operative for more than thirty-six years,
yet a species of slavery still exists there, fostered and nurtured by
the statutes authorizing the convict lease system. So vile became this
evil in Anderson county, South Carolina, that the leading officials
there denounced it as brutal and barbarous, a crime against nature and
nature's