power of habit as the sum of reiterated choice."

At the Prison Reform Convention, held in Atlanta in 1888, Dr. P. D.
Sims of Chattanooga, Tenn., said that, the impoverished condition of
the South succeeding the War of the Rebellion, caused it to drift into
the convict lease system, for which there were many excuses, but no
justification. The lessee buys from the State the discipline of
prisoners solely for gain; that neither the State nor the lessee had
regard to the element of reform or consideration of a philanthropic
character; that although many good men were engaged in it, the system
was wrong. He presented the statistics of thirty-nine State prisons,
showing that in the non-leasing prisons, the annual mortality was
fifteen per thousand, while in the leasing, it was sixty-four per
thousand, and that in the former, escapes were but five per thousand,
and in the latter, they were fifty-one per thousand. He appealed to
the South to change the system.

The lease system was adopted in Georgia in 1869, both Democrats and
Republicans favoring it. The first year there were 350 convicts to be
hired, and the second year the number doubled. An investigation showed
that one company paid nothing to the State for the labor of its
convicts, and that although the law provided for a chaplain, the State
had none; that convicts were worked on Sundays contrary to law, and in
some instances whipped to death. The evils of the system became so
flagrant that a Senator on the floor of the Senate Chamber declared
that the rich and powerful were allowed to go free, while the poor
white person and the ignorant Negro were shown no mercy. It was proved
that even a governor of the State was himself a lessee, working State
convicts for private gain, under a $37,000 bond in force until 1899,
although he was the convict's only protection against the wrongs of
the lessee.

The ease and facility with which colored persons were sent to the
penitentiary kept a goodly supply of prisoners on hand. While it was
burdensome to taxpayers to keep them within walls, it was unjust to
mechanics to allow them to learn trades; ergo, they were leased out to
grade streets, to work on railroads, in mines and the like, where
their physical powers might be availed of, but where they could learn
nothing, save yes and no, axe and hoe.

By an act passed in 1876, by the legislature, the Marietta and North
Georgia Railroad Company was leased 250 convicts for three yea