erities and enabled vast
number of people possessing conscience and character to assume the
relation of master. But in the treatment of the colored man, now
proposed, there was absolute heartlessness and rank injustice. It was
proposed to punish him for no crime, to declare the laborer not worthy
of his hire, to leave him friendless and forlorn, without sympathy,
without rights under the law, socially an outcast and industrially a
serf--a serf who had no connection with the land he tilled, and who had
none of the protection which even the Autocracy of Russia extended to
the lowliest creature that acknowledged the sovereignty of the Czar.

These laws were framed with malignant cunning so as not to be limited
in specific form of words to the negro race, but they were exclusively
confined to that race in their execution. It is barely possible that
a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be
arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of
vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law
specially enacted to fit his case. Loitering around tippling-shops,
one of the offenses enumerated, was in far larger proportions the habit
of white men, but they were left untouched and the negro alone was
arrested and punished. In the entire code this deceptive form, of
apparently including all persons, was a signally dishonest feature.
The makers of the law evidently intended that it should apply to the
negro alone, for it was administered on that basis with rigorous
severity. The general phrasing was to deceive people outside, and,
perhaps, to lull the consciences of some objectors at home, but it made
no difference whatever in the execution of the statutes. White men,
who had no more visible means of support than the negro, were left
undisturbed, while the negro, whose visible means of support were in
his strong arms and his willingness to work, was prevented from using
the resources conferred upon him by nature, and reduced not merely to
the condition of a slave, but subjected to the demoralization of being
adjudged a criminal.

In Florida the laws resembled those of Alabama, but were perhaps more
severe in their penalties. The "vagrant" there might be hired out for
full twelve months, and the money arising from his labor, in case the
man had no wife and children, was directed to be applied for "the
benefit of the orphans and poor of the county," although the negro had
been