pilfering is grand larceny; and the only thing necessary to make the "Mississippi plan " perfect in its way is the addition of chickens to shoats, lambs and kids.

The infamous Alabama law. The Legislature of Alabama have refined on the Mississippi plan so far as to add to the provision making the stealing of any kind of domestic animal grand larceny without regard to its value, a half dozen roasting ears or a pound of cotton. The following is from acts of 1874-75, p. 260: "An act to amend section 8706 of the Revised Code :

"Any person who steals any horse, mare, gelding, colt, filly, mule, jack, jenny, cow or animal of the cow kind, hog, sheep, goat, or any part of any outstanding crop of corn or cotton, and any personal property other than that herein before enumerated exceeding twentyfive dollars in value, is guilty of grand larceny, and must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary, or sentenced to hard labor for the county, for not less than two nor more than five years.

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By the application of the landlord lien law, referred to hereafter, this provision can be enforced against a man who takes a mess of roasting ears of his own raising, before he has paid the landlord all claims for rent and ad

vances.

PART III.

The contract system-Criminals of low degree worked for years on legal slave gangs-Laborers, not dangerous Criminals, wanted-Barbarous cases in Texas and Mississippi.

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By section three of the act of March 2, 1875 (page 96, Laws of Mississippi, 1875), the county commissioners are authorized to contract with any responsible person for the maintenance of any prisoners in the county jail, and who are under sentence of any court, in compensation for their labor." And "all persons contracting for the services of prisoners under this act shall have the same powers, privileges, and control of prisoners as are now vested in persons who contract and employ prisoners confined in the penitentiary."

A charge as good as conviction. By the preceding act persons charged with crime and unable to give bail were allowed to elect whether they would work with the other prisoners; but by the refinement which comes of experience, the act was amended in 1878, as follows:

"That in any county in which there shall be a contractor for keeping prisoners, if any person committed to the jail for an offense that is bailable, shall not consent to be committed to the safe keeping and custody of the said contractor, and to work for the same under the provisions of this act, such prisoner

shall be entitled to receive from the common jailor, as diet for each day, only six ounces of bacon, or ten ounces of beef, and one pound of bread and water. And if saiá prisoner be afterward convicted he shall nevertheless work under the said contractor a sufficient term to pay all costs of prosecution, including the regular jail fees for keeping and feeding him during his entire confinement."

Thus the vaguest suspicion against a colored man may be made as profitable to the contracting ring as poof of his guilt, for between the alternatives of work or semi-starvation, there are few who will not choose the first.

Colored men the only victims of the law.

The prevalence of this system is one of the most common reasons assigned by colored people for the exodus from the South to

Northern States.

The laws of all the States where it prevails except dangerous criminals-the class of crimNorthern States-from its operation. These inals who are confined in penitentiaries in would not be safe and profitable as laborers on railroads or cotton plantations, and are kept within the walls of the prisons. White criminals of this class may also be convicted and confined in the penitentiary; but the corresponding class with most of the colored men who are made the victims of the contract system, are not punished at all. A witness on the Democratic side from one of the largest counties of Mississippi, a county officer for seven years, testified that a great many colored people were contracted out at every term of the court, and admitted that he had never known of one white man being so hired out [p. 535, part 3 of the Senate Report, 693, 1880]. Similar testimony was given in regard to Texas [p 415].

To be transported to other counties. Alabama having come into the hands of the Democrats, similar contract laws were passed in 1873, with a restriction that the prisoners should not be contracted or taken out of the county. The restriction did not suit a system which might render it desirable to send its victims out of reach of their friends, and by the act of March 20, 1875, this prohibition of the former act is repealed.

The contract system in Georgia shocks the

Christian world.

The contract system also prevails in Georgia [Laws of 1876, pp. 40-45], and a sentence to the penitentiary is a sentence to a system so cruel and inhuman that the hints of its details which have reached the public during the past few years, have shocked the moral sense of the Christian world.

The authorities of counties are in like manner authorized to hire out all criminals who

are not sentenced to the penitentiary, or employ them on public works. [Laws of Georgia, 1874, p. 24.]

Steady growth of the evil. ¿ Previous to the passage of this act they were only employed upon public works

Progression in evil.

The foregoing are fair samples of the tenant laws in all the Southern States. As the conservatives became assured that their control of the legislative was permanent, they regularly eliminated all the just and merciful features of the laws, until they have reached their present tyrannical form and made universal the barbarous practices which are making the States, nominally free, really slave.

Outrageous prices exacted.

Under the operation of the law the most outrageous extortions are practised on the colored people. They are charged an annual rental of from five to ten dollars an acreoften more than the land itself will bring if sold in fee simple. They are charged double for bran, corn, meal, &c., that the same may be had for from the storekeeper who would also pay them a fair price for their produce. But with the landlord's lien covering everything, they can neither sell nor buy except at his pleasure and to his profit.

"Only hard on the surface.” Senators Voorhees, Vance, and Pendleton, in their report to the Senate on the recent exodus from the South, admit that "the landlord class, for their own protection, procured the passage of the laws giving them a lien

"upon the surface these laws appeared to be hard.” Yet the committee thought them among the most beneficent of provisions for the blacks.

The thousands of colored people striving to get away from their operation seem to think differently—that the laws are hard to the core.

Bad men in spite of such good laws. "Your committee regret to say that they found it to be frequently the case that designing men, or bad and dishonest men, would take advantage of the ignorance or necessity of the negroes." [P. 6, Senate Report, 693, 1880.]

The committee then proceeds to argue that bad men exist everywhere, but ignores the fact that bad men elsewhere are bad in violaton of law, while in the case under consideration the law seems to have been made for bad men; to give them greater facilities for inhumanity.

The system breeds bad men.

Before the war all the cruelties of slavery were laid on bad men and the overseers. Slavery made these classes, and all its laws were made to protect them in villainy by the good men who reaped the greater part of the profit. So at the present time the lien laws of the South are made to enable the bad men to inaugurate and perpetuate practises which will make the good men's plantations equally profitable.

The profit and abomination is universal, and the solid South must endure the just indignation of the civilized world.

PART I.

The Labor Question—Democratic Efforts to Degrade and Brutalize Labor-The Republican Party the True Labor Party. What does the workingman want that the Republican party is not pledged by every tradition and measure to do for him? That party was absolutely born in a fight with the slave power-the power of owned labor, owned by Democrats. And throughout its existence it has ever frowned down and legislated against any and all movements to degrade labor and make it servile. The Democratic party, on the other hand, has not had a thought for the past forty-five years beyond the preservation of the accursed systems of slavery and servile labor. For the right to

own slave labor instead of paying “a fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' that party plunged the nation into a terrible four-year's sectional war. For the right to own labor under a system of peonage (quite as degrading as the old system of slavery), instead of paying "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, that party, in the event of a close electoral majority for Garfield and Arthur, will not hesitate to plunge this nation into all the horrors of a civil war. Out of that threatening civil war the Democratic party, controlled by the South, believes it will come bloodily triumphant, with the old labor ideas of the South dominant over all of the United States. Nothing can be more instructive to the laborer of the North than a brief review of the Southern "idea of labor-an "idea," which, though changed in its practical expression, from slavery in the past to the peonage of the present and future, survives the war, and

"Let it be fixed, let it be riveted in every Southern mind, that the laws of the slave-holding States, FOR THE PROTECTION OF THEIR DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS, are PARAMOUNT ΤΟ THE LAWS OF THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT in regulation of commerce and the mail, and that the latter MUST yield to the former in the event of conflict; and that, if the Government should refuse to yield, the States have a right to interpose, and we [the South] are safe."

Calhoun's coadjutors of the press faithfully followed his lead; and by the agitation of the question of slavery, by the most unfounded and slanderous charges against the North, by lying denunciations of the purest men of the country, by the most outrageous and unconstitutional demands impossible to be complied with, emulated all Calhoun's efforts to foment an implacable hatred between the citizens of the North and South, to sow the seeds of an irreconcilable discord and strife between the sections, to plant and drive home the wedge they hoped would finally burst the bonds of our Union. Congress was the seat of their Central Directory for the working of the chief machinery of this traitorous Democratic movement for the destruction of the Union.

Mr. Pickens, of S. C., was one of the chief conspirators. In the House of Representatives, in 1836, at the first session of the Twenty-fourth Congress, he said:

"I lay down this proposition as universally true, that there is not, nor ever was, a society organized under one political system for a period long enough to constitute an era, where one class would not practically and substantially own another class in some shape or form. Let not gentlemen from the North start at this truth: we are yet, as a people, in our infancy. Society has not yet been pressed down into its classifications. Let us live through an era, and then we shall discover this great truth; all society settles down into Capitalists and Laborers, the FORMER will OWN the LATTER, either collec tively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude, as exists in the Southern States of this confederacy. THE ONLY CONTEST IN THE WORLD IS BETWEEN THE TWO SYSTEMS! If Laborers ever obtain the political power of a country, it is, in fact, in a state of revolution, which must end in substantially transferring property to themselves until they shall become capitalists, unless those who have it shall appeal to the Sword and a standing army to protect it. This is the history of all civilized people."

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Calhoun, in 1835, had laid down the doctrine that there was a " "HIGHER LAW than the Constitution, "that the laws of the slaveholding States were paramount to the laws of the general government, for the protection of their domestic institutions," and that in case of conflict, the Constitution must yield to the law of the slaveholder; and here, in 1836, the doctrine of the "IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT was enunand emphatically as it was subsequently by ciated by the Democratic Pickens as distinctly Messrs. Seward and Lincoln in 1856. He astween the two systems!" But while Lincoln and sures us that "the only contest in the world is beSeward believed that in this conflict Freedom would ultimately triumph, the Democratic Pickens very dogmatically maintains that the white Mechanic and Laborer must become SLAVES!

PART III.

The “irrepressible conflict" between genius, wealth and "the mob" on one side, and the hereditary slave-holding aristocrats" of the South-Democracy declares war against the white Mechanic and Laborer.

At the same session of the Twenty-fourth Congress, General Waddy Thompson and Hammond, afterwards Governor of South Carolina and Senator of the United States, maintained similar doctrines. Hammond, in a speech remarkable for itsi venom and vitu

perative abuse of the white Mechanic and Laborer, pronounces slavery "the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon the glorious "aristocracy" of the South! He enlarges upon what he calls the conflict of genius and wealth with hereditary institutions-in reality, the irrepressible conflict" between Freedom and Slavery. He says:

themselves still unable to cope with the time-hardened "The two [genius and wealth] combined, finding strength of hereditary government, and eager, impatient and almost frenzied to achieve its conquest, have called in to their assistance another ally-the people / Not the 'people' as we have hitherto been accustomed in this country to define that term, but the MOB-the BANS CULOTTES! Proclaiming as their watchword that immortal but now prostituted sentiment, THAT ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL,' they have rallied to their standard the ignorant, uneducated, and semibarbarous mass which swarms and starves upon the face of Europe! Unnatural and debasing union! Hereditary institutions are gone! Already have the nobility of France been overthrown! their days are numbered in the British Empire! Let them go on! I am not their advocate. What next? Confiscation has begun! The end is as obvious as if it were written on the wall. The hounds of Acteon turned upon their master. Genius and wealth, stimulated by an ambition that o'erleaps itself, have called these spirits from the vasty deep, but they will down no more ! The spoils of victory are theirs, and they will gorge and fatten on them!"

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"Against this institution [slavery] war has been commenced!" * * "The SANS CULOTTES are moving! On the banks of the Hudson, the Ohio, and the Susquehanna-on the hills and in the vales, and along the iron-bound coasts' of immaculate New England-they are mustering their hosts and preparing for their ravages!

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