wealth and
power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants.
Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black,
have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such, there
is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither
sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends.
Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white
laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to
maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital.
The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among
the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice
which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites
to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated,
as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the
freedmen from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the
freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and
the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the
whites.

Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or
oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst
and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system
which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result
of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of
cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which
can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I
have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy
and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in
the face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to
him pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to
labor on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black
farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to
his farm and strip it of every single marketable article,--mules,
ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks,
looking-glass,--and all this without a sheriff or officer, in the face
of the law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a single
responsible person any account or r