sonment.

For instance, if a rich man were assaulted and made a complaint, all
that he had to do was to give bail to insure his appearance as a
witness. But if a poor man or woman were cheated or assaulted and could
not give bail to insure his or her appearance at the trial as a
complaining witness, the law compelled the authorities to lock up that
man or woman in prison. In the debates in the New York Constitutional
Convention of 1846, numerous cases were cited of this continuing
barbarity in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and other states. In
Maryland a young woman was assaulted and preferred criminal charges. As
she could not give bail she was locked up for eighteen months as a
detained witness. This was but one instance in thousands of similar
cases.

MASTER AND BONDED MAN.

For an apprenticed laborer to quit his master and job was a crime in
law; once caught he was forthwith bundled off to jail, there to await
the dispensation of his master. No matter how cruelly his master
ill-treated him, however dissatisfied he was, the apprenticed laborer in
law had no rights. Almost every day the newspapers of the eighteenth,
and the early part of the nineteenth, century contained offers of
rewards for the apprehension of fugitive apprentice laborers; from a
survey of the Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and other colonial
and state newspapers it is clear that thousands of these apprentices had
to resort to flight to escape their bondage. This is a specimen
advertisement:

TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD.

RAN away from the subscriber, an Apprentice Boy, named William
Rustes, about 18 years and 3 months old, by trade a house
carpenter, of a dark complexion, dark eye brows, black eyes and
black hair, about 5 feet, 8 inches high, his dress unknown as he
took with him different kinds of clothes. The above reward will be
paid to any person that will secure him in gaol or return him to
his master.

GEORGE LORD,
No. 12 First Street.[57]

In contradistinction to the scorpion-like laws which worked such
injustice to the poor and which made a mockery of doctrines of equality
before the law, the propertied interests endowed themselves, by their
control of government, with invaluable exemptions and peculiarly
profitable special privileges.

Even where, in civil cases, all men, theoretically, had an equal chance
in courts of equity, litigation was made so expensive, whether purposely
or n