ime when savages were put to
death when taken in battle to the time when men realized that they could
eat bread by the sweat of other men's faces.

It is a remarkable concurrence of historical facts that the opening of the
Panama Canal will be precisely the four hundredth anniversary of the
introduction of Negro slavery into the Western Hemisphere. Most of those
centuries were passed without any alleviation of the condition of the
chattel slave. The Liberal and Revolutionary movements of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries brought about the downfall of chattel slavery as
a system of labor in the civilized world. Immediately succeeding the
emancipation of the slave from chattelism, slavery reappeared in a new
form. The former slave-holding states enacted a series of so-called "Labor
Laws" intended to apply exclusively to the recently emancipated slaves,
which at that time so outraged public sentiment that the American nation
just emerged from the great war, intending to destroy every vestige of
slavery and its incidents, conferred upon the Negro the common and
universal legal rights which pertained to white men throughout the English
speaking world. It was evidently the thought and purpose of the men of
that day to cure in the light of the formulas and promises of their
fundamental charters the curse that had been a sore to civilization for
years. And for a time it looked as though they had done so, but of late
years there has grown up a series of laws and court decisions giving
distinct recognition to the fact of Race, and in spite of the
constitutional guaranties, differentiating at least in the matter of the
enjoyment of rights as between white men and black men. This paper is
concerned merely with those distinctive laws which relate to labor.

In all English speaking countries the freedom of labor has been a
fundamental principle of the law, and the freedom of contract has been
absolutely unlimited and unhampered, as was also the right to abrogate or
to disregard the contract of labor on the part of the laborer, there being
no remedy of specific performance against him. The failure to observe the
contract of employment was never, until recently, regarded as a criminal
offense, and the only remedy that the employer had against the employee
who willfully or who for good reason or for no reason refused to live up
to his contract was an action for damages sustained. Of late years there
has grown up in the former slav