The Southern South Part 13

In slavery times plantation owners got into the habit of spending their crop before it was grown, and that is still the practice of by far the greater number of cotton planters and farmers, large and small. In flush times agents of large cotton brokers and wholesale establishments literally press check books into the hands of planters and invite them to use credit or cash to their hearts' content. There is some justification in the system as applied to cotton culture, which over large areas is the only sale crop; and under which (for the same system runs down to the very bottom) the planters themselves are in the habit of making advances to their tenants and hands. The white and negro land owner commonly make arrangements "to be furnished" by the nearest country storekeeper; or by a store or bank, or white friend in the nearest city. On the plantation, the planter himself commonly furnishes his own hands, and has a store or "commissary" for that purpose. Neither banker nor planter expects to lose money; both are subject to heavy deductions by the failure of planters and the departure of hands, and hence they recoup themselves from those who will pay. The effect is, of course, that when the cotton is sold and accounted for, the planter and his hand alike may not have any surplus to show, and begin the new year in debt. And the same round may be gone over again year by year during a lifetime.

The system is enforced by lien loans, through which the crop is the security for the loan, and in addition it is customary for the small farmer to mortgage mules, tools, and whatever else he may have. As Stone explains: "The factor's method of self-protection is to take a deed of trust on the live stock and prospective crop, and is the same whether the applicant be a two-mule Negro renter, or the white owner of a thousand acres of land, wanting ten thousand dollars of advances.... There is, however, this difference: the white man gets his advances in cash, available at stated intervals, while the Negro gets the most of his in the shape of supplies." Many people believe that the whole crop lien system is an incentive to debt, that if it were abolished people would have to depend upon their character and credit; and hence a determined effort was made in South Carolina in 1908 to repeal the lien law outright.

The obvious defects of this system, the tendency to extravagance, the not knowing where you stand, the prevention of saving habits, are aggravated for the Negro because the white man keeps the books. The Negro is accustomed to be charged prices which in many cases are a half higher than the cash price of the same article in the nearby stores; he knows that there will be an interest charge at the rate of from ten per cent to forty per cent on his running account, and he suspects (sometimes with reason) that the bookkeeping is careless or fraudulent. Some planters make a practice of ending the settlement of every account with a row, and the consequent frame of mind of the Negro is ill.u.s.trated by a stock story. A Negro has been trading with a local merchant and goes to a new store because they offer twelve pounds of sugar for a dollar instead of ten. On his way back he pa.s.ses the old place, where they ask him in, weigh up his sugar, and show him that he has actually only nine pounds instead of twelve. "Yes, boss, dat's so, but after all, perhaps he didn't get the best of it; while he was weighing out that sugar, I slips dis yere pair of shoes into my basket."

The story precisely ill.u.s.trates the futility of cheating the Negro; for whenever he thinks his accounts are juggled, he will see to it that his labor is no more conscientious than the bookkeeper's. Many of the really long-headed planters see that the less the relations of employer and hand are matters of favor, and the more they become affairs of business, the easier it will be to get on with their hands. Many of them have a fixed basis for advances, not more than about fifteen dollars a month for a family, and that in provisions only; others keep no book accounts for such advances, but issue coupon books of say fifteen dollars every month. A few pay their wage hands and give out the advances in cash, allowing people to buy where they will. A very few decline to have anything to do with advances in any form; but inasmuch as the Negroes must eat, in such cases the hands usually get somebody else to furnish them. Some planters close up their accounts at the end of the year, compelling the Negroes to turn in whatever they have in property to close out their accounts, and then start in afresh.

All these are only palliatives; the net effect of the system of advances to hands is to accentuate the industrial character of the cotton plantation. A big plantation in central Alabama or the Delta of Mississippi cannot be compared with any Northern farms, nor even with the great ranches of California; it is very like a coal mine back in a cove of the mountains of Pennsylvania; the same forlorn houses, the same company store, the same system of store orders and charges; only the coal mine sells its product from day to day and pays any differences in cash at the end of the month, while the cotton hand must wait till his particular bale is sold at the end of the season, before he can draw his profit. The Negro is therefore less likely than the miner to lay tip money, and is even more at the mercy of the company's bookkeeper.

Here is an actual annual account of a plantation family in the Delta of Mississippi, two adults and one child, poor workers:

-------------------------------------------- Debit Credit ------------ -------- ------------- -------- Doctor $24.45 Cotton $498.57 Mule 33.00 Cotton seed 91.00 Clothing 53.40 Rations 60.00 -------- Feed 11.25 $589.57 Rent 130.50 Extra labor 179.45 -------- Seed 11.90 Ginning 43.50 Cash down 53.50 Debit. $11.38 -------- 600.95 $600.95 --------------------------------------------

These people got their living and sixty-six dollars in cash and credit during the year; but the charge for extra labor shows that they were s.h.i.+ftless and did not work out their own crop. On the same plantation an industrious family of three adults and one child earned in a year $974, of which $450 was net cash.

An examination of various plantation accounts reveals the fact that the actual earnings of the negro hands, if industrious, are considerably greater than the average for the Pennsylvania miners, but of course the whole family works in the fields. The renters could do still better if they had money enough to carry them through the year; on a prosperous plantation in Arkansas, only about one fortieth of all the negro gangs kept off the books of the company and drew their earnings in cash at the end of the year, while two thirds of the Italians employed on the same plantation had no store accounts. In fact there is some complaint that the Italians club together and buy their provisions at wholesale.

The advance system is complicated by a system of "Christmas Money." You hear planters bitterly cursing the Negroes who have demanded $25, $50, or $100 to spend at Christmas time, as though the money were not charged against the Negro to be deducted at the end of the year; and as though it were not so advanced in order to induce the Negro to make a contract with them. Many planters refuse to give Christmas money and yet fill up their plantation houses. It is all part of a vicious system; the wage hands have to be paid somehow, though often not completely paid up till the end of the year; the share hands and renters are carried by the planter because they always have been carried; and because bad planters can take advantage of this opportunity to squeeze their hands. The difficulty is one known in other lands; in Ceylon, for instance, the laborers on tea and rubber estates draw advances, carry debts which have to be a.s.sumed by a new employer, trade at a "caddy," which is the same thing as a commissary, and complain of the accounts.

The system is just as vicious for the small land owners both negro and white. Most Southern states under their crop lien law allow the growing crop to be mortgaged for cash or advances, and hence any farmer has credit for supplies or loans up to the probable value of the crop when marketed.

That value is variable, the advances are clogged with interest and overcharges, and the whole system is a heavy draft on the country. There are money sharks in the Southern country as well as in the Northern cities, and many scandalous transactions. One man in Alabama has 2,500 Negroes on his books for loans, in some cases for a loan of $5 with interest charges of $1.50 a month. Cases have been known where a Negro brought to a plantation his mules and stock, worked a season, and at the end saw all his crop of cotton taken, and his property swept up, including the mules, which are exempt by law. Many back plantations take the seed for the ginning--that is, they exact more than twice what the service is worth. A Negro has been known to borrow say $200; when it was not paid, the white lender seized on all his possessions, and without going through any legal formality gave him credit for $100, leaving the balance of the debt hanging over his head. A peddler has been known to insist on leaving a clock at the house of a poor colored woman who protested that she did not want a clock, could not afford a clock and would not take a clock. The man drove off, returned some months later, demanded payment for the clock which was just where he left it, never having been started, and when the money was not forthcoming proceeded to take away the woman's chickens--her poor little livelihood. She ran to a white neighbor, who came back with her and turned the scoundrel out. There is first and last much of this advantage taken of the ignorance and poverty of the Negro; a certain type of planter declares that he can make more money out of an ignorant black than out of an educated one. As one of the white friends of the colored race in the South says, the Negroes must receive at least sufficient education to enable them to protect themselves against such exaction.

Considering the immense importance of cotton to the South, it is amazing how wasteful is its culture and its distribution. Experts say that a great part of the cost of fertilizers could be saved by cultivating the cow pea. About six per cent of the value of the fiber--a trifle of forty million dollars--is seriously injured by ginning. Comparatively few farmers or planters select their seed, though several of the Southern agricultural colleges have set up cotton schools, and the president of the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College has actually begun to hold farmers' inst.i.tutes for the negro farmers. The cotton bale is probably the most careless package used for a valuable product. It sometimes literally drops to pieces before it reaches the consumer; and of course the grower, in the long run, loses by the poor quality or the poor packing of his product. The grading of cotton requires that a large quant.i.ty be brought together in one place, and the small grower gets little advantage out of improvement in his staple.

What the South most needs in cotton is the improvement of the labor. As President Hardy, of the Mississippi Agricultural College, says: "So many of our negroes are directing their own work that their efficiency must be preserved and increased or great injury will result to our whole economic system. The prosperity of our section as a whole is affected by the productive capacity of every individual in our midst. The negro's inefficiency is a great financial drain on the South, and I believe this farmers' inst.i.tute work for the negro is the beginning of a permanent policy that will be very far-reaching in its results. There is no doubt that this is one of the ways of increasing the cotton production of the country that has heretofore received very little attention."

It remains to consider the relation of the race question to cotton manufacture. Long before the Civil War it was seen that the Southern staple was being sent to foreign countries and to the North to be manufactured, and that the South was buying back its own material in cotton goods; therefore some cotton mills were constructed in the South.

The labor in these mills seems to have been entirely white, but their product, which was of the coa.r.s.er qualities, was never large enough to control the market. About 1880 came a new era of cotton manufacture, aided first by the extension of the railway system, second by the development of water power, and third by the discovery that the poor whites make a tolerable mill population. Hence grew up a chain of flouris.h.i.+ng factory towns, most of them on or near the "fall line," so as to take advantage of the water powers, and there has been a steady growth of Southern manufactures. In 1887 the Southern mills worked up only 400,000 bales, which was one fifth of the staple used for manufactures in the United States. Twenty years later they were making up 2,400,000 bales, which was one half the consumption. The state of South Carolina alone in 1905 produced manufactures to the amount of $79,000,000.

The first thing to notice in this manufacture is that the mill hands are still exclusively white. Several efforts have been made in Columbia, Charleston, and elsewhere to carry on cotton mills with negro labor, and a few negro capitalists have built mills in which they expected to employ people of their own race; but every one of these experiments seems to have been a failure, partly because of the ignorance of the average Negro who could be drawn into the industry, and partly because of his irregularity.

The Poor Whites do not make by any means the best mill help, and their output of yards per hand is considerably less than that in the Northern states. The supply of white labor also shows signs of depletion, though Mountain Whites are being brought down; it is still a question whether they will settle in the new places, or whether after they have saved money they will return to their mountains. Hence the frantic efforts to bring in mill hands from outside the South. Northern hands will not accept a lower wage scale and do not like the social conditions. It is plain that the Southern cotton manufacture is entirely dependent upon the supply of native white labor.

Notwithstanding the great growth of cotton manufacture in the South, the fine qualities are still made elsewhere; and the capital employed, the total wages paid, and the value of output are much greater in the North.

The value of the product in South Carolina rose between 1890 and 1905 from $10,000,000 to $50,000,000, but in the same period the value in Ma.s.sachusetts rose from $100,000,000 to $130,000,000. The output of cotton goods in Columbia, $5,000,000 is less than half the output of Nashua, New Hamps.h.i.+re. The New England states still furnish nearly one half the output of cotton manufactures, measured by value. The Northern states as a whole pay $65,000,000 a year for wages against $27,000,000 in the South; and their product is $270,000,000 against $268,000,000 in the South. It is evident, therefore, that the scepter for cotton manufacture has not yet pa.s.sed into the hands of the South.

The discussion of the economic forces and tendencies of the South in the last three chapters may now be briefly recapitulated. The South is a prosperous and advancing region on the highway to wealth, but advancing rather more slowly than other agricultural sections of the country, and in material wealth far behind the West and farther behind the Middle states and New England. It will be several decades before the South can possibly have as much acc.u.mulation as that now in possession of the region which most resembles it in the United States, the Middle West and Far West. Of its sources of wealth, the timber is temporary, mining and iron making limited in area. The chief employment must always be agriculture, and particularly cotton. Cotton culture on a large scale, as now carried on, is an industrial enterprise in which the laborer is likely to be exploited. The advance system is a curse to the South, inciting to extravagance and leading to dreams of wealth not yet created; it is especially bad for the Negro, who is at his best as a renter, or still more as the owner of land. Economically the progress of the negro laborer is very slow, but he is absolutely necessary to the welfare of the South, for no subst.i.tute can be discerned.

CHAPTER XX

PEONAGE

From the earlier chapters on the Negroes and on the Cotton Hands it is plain that the Southern agricultural laborer is unsatisfactory to his employer, and not happy in himself; that the two races, though allied, are yet in disharmony. Of recent years a new or rather a renewed cause of race hostility has been found, because the great demand for labor, chiefly in the cotton fields, gives rise to the startling abuse of a system of forced labor, commonly called peonage, which at the mildest is the practice of thras.h.i.+ng a hand who misbehaves on the plantation, and in its farthest extent is virtually slavery. For this system the white race is solely accountable, inasmuch as it is the work of white men, sometimes under the protection of laws made by white legislatures, and always because of an insufficient public sentiment among white people.

When the slaves were set free, the federal government was careful to protect them against a relapse into bondage. The Thirteenth Amendment, which went into effect in 1865, absolutely prohibited "slavery or involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In addition, in 1867, an act of Congress formally prohibited "the system known as peonage." A further statue of 1874 declared it a crime "to kidnap or carry away any other person with intent to hold him in involuntary servitude." The word "peonage" comes from the Mexican system of serfdom, the principle of which is, that if an employee owes his master he must continue to serve him until that debt is paid, the only escape being that if another employer is willing to come forward and a.s.sume the debt the employee is allowed to transfer his obligation to the new master. In practice, the system amounts to va.s.salage, inasmuch as the debt is usually allowed to reach a figure which there is no hope of paying off.

The term "involuntary servitude" is clear enough, and it is a curious fact that when the Philippine Islands were annexed there was a system of slavery in the Sulu Archipelago which was actually recognized by a treaty made by General Bates; but the federal government dropped the treaty, and there is no doubt that the United States courts would uphold any Sulu bondman who sought his liberty under the Thirteenth Amendment.

In 1865 some of the Southern states pa.s.sed vagrant laws under which Negroes were obliged to make a labor contract for a year, and could be compelled to carry out that contract; and the belief in the North that these statutes were virtually intended to reenslave the freedmen was one of the mainsprings of the Fourteenth Amendment and the other Reconstruction legislation.

Inasmuch as the raising of cotton requires almost continuous labor, it is customary to make voluntary contracts with both renters and wage hands running for a year, commonly from the first of January; and breach of contract is a special grief and loss to the planter, inasmuch as if a Negro throws up a crop it is often impossible to find anybody else to finish it. Hence has grown up almost unconsciously a practice which closely resembles the Mexican peonage. It is unwritten law among some planters that n.o.body must give employment for the remainder of the year to a hand who is known to have left his crop on another plantation; and still further, that no contract should be made at the beginning of the year with a family which, after accounting for the previous crop, is still in debt to a neighbor, except that the new employer may pay the old debt and charge it as an advance against the hand. There is nowhere any legal sanction of this widespread practice, but the result is that thousands of Negroes are practically fastened to their plantation because n.o.body else in the neighborhood will give them employment; and far too many planters therefore make it a point to keep their hands in debt.

This system grew up slowly and attracted little attention till it began to be applied to Whites. During the last ten years the South has been opening up sawmills and lumber camps, often far back in the wilderness. In order to get men either from the South or the North, it was necessary to prepay their fare, which was subsequently taken out of their wages. Hence the proprietors of those camps felt that they had a claim on the men's service, and in some cases kept them shut up in stockades. For instance, in 1906, a Hungarian named Trudics went down to Lockhart, Texas, receiving $18.00 for railroad fare, on an agreement to work for $1.50 a day. He did not like the work and thought he had been deceived as to the terms; whereupon he used a freedman's privilege of bolting. He was trailed with bloodhounds by one Gallagher, caught, brutally whipped by the boss, and driven back, as he said, "like a steer at the point of a revolver."

Similar cases have been reported from various parts of the South, involving both native Americans and foreigners; the latter have sometimes had the special advantage of aid from the diplomatic representatives of their country. Inasmuch as some of the state courts were unwilling to take action, cases were brought before the federal courts under the Peonage Act of 1867. Thus, though the personal abuse of Trudics by Gallagher was a state offense which seems to have escaped punishment, the violent laying of hands on him and restraint of his liberty was made a case before a federal court; and Gallagher was sent to prison for three months. It is plain that if foreigners and white Northerners can be practically enslaved, the same thing may happen to white Southerners; this and other like convictions have had a good effect. Quite beyond the injustice of the practice, it has been a damage to the South because it checks a possible current of immigration.

In 1908 an attempt was made to show a case of peonage of Italians on the Sunny Side plantation, Arkansas. It proved that one of the hands had grown dissatisfied and started to Greenville to take a train for the wide world, leaving unpaid a debt of about a hundred dollars at the commissary. One of his employers followed him to the station and told him that if he attempted to leave he would arrest him for breach of contract; whereupon the man returned to the plantation. This was certainly not peonage, and the grand jury consequently refused to indict; but it was an attempt to enforce specific performance of a labor contract. Peonage of Whites seems to have about come to an end; it was not stopped, however, by public opinion in the South, and it still goes on through the holding in bondage of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Negroes, either in unabashed defiance of law or through the means of cruelly harsh and unjust laws, aided by bad judges.

In the first place, many planters a.s.sume that a Negro who is on the debit side on their books has no right to leave the plantation, even for a few days, and as one of them expressed it to me: "If he goes away, I just go and get him." A case recently occurred in Monroe, La., where some colored men were brought from Texas by one Cole on the a.s.surance that they were to be employed in Arkansas. Instead they were switched off and set to work in Louisiana. One of them departed and made his way to Texas, but his master followed him, seized him, brought him back in defiance of all law, and set him at work again. The master was tried for peonage in Texas, but was not convicted.

One of the worst criminal cases of this kind is that of John W. Pace, of Dade City, Ala., who not only shut in his own people, but would seize any black that chanced along that way and compel him to work for him a few days. Judge Thomas G. Jones, who in 1901 was put on the federal bench in that state, made it his business to follow up Pace; when a jury declined to convict him, the judge rated them soundly; another case was made out and Pace thought it prudent to plead guilty, and was sentenced to fifty-five years in the penitentiary. The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the const.i.tutionality of the peonage law and Pace threw up his hands; then, on the request of the judge, the President pardoned him.

These and some like convictions have shaken the system of confining men because the employer thinks that otherwise they will go away.

Nevertheless, under cover of iniquitous state laws, peonage of Negroes goes on steadily, first by a most unjust enforcement of various special state statutes which require agricultural labor contracts to be made in writing, and to run for a year. The illiterate Negro often does not know what he is signing, and if he did know might see no means of helping himself. It is difficult to contrive a legal penalty for a Negro who simply leaves his contract and goes off; he might be arrested and held for debt, since almost all such hands owe their employer for supplies or money; but all the Southern states have const.i.tutional provisions against imprisonment for debt. The difficulty is ingeniously avoided by most of the states in the Lower South, which make it a punishable offense to draw advances on "false pretenses"; thereby a hand who attempts to leave while in debt to his master can be arrested as a petty criminal. But how is it provable that the Negro might not intend to return and carry out his contract? In Alabama the legislature, with intent to avoid the federal peonage law, has provided that the acceptance of an advance and the subsequent nonperformance of the contract shall be proof presumptive of fraudulent intent _at the time of making the contract_. Now the employer can follow his absconding hand by a process thus described by a planter.

You arrest him on the criminal charge of false pretenses, which is equivalent to a charge of stealing the money; you get him convicted; he is fined, and in lieu of money to pay the fine he goes to jail; then you pay the fine and costs and the judge a.s.signs him to you to work out the fine, and you have him back on your plantation, backed up by the authority of the state.

Let a few actual ill.u.s.trations, all based on Southern testimony, show what is done under such a system. A woman borrows six dollars of a neighboring planter, who afterwards makes a demand for the money. As it is not paid, he sets up without further ceremony the pretense that she is obliged to work for him, refuses to receive back the money which her present employer furnishes her, and attempts to compel her to labor. In South Carolina a man starts to leave his employer, a.s.serting that he has paid up his debt; the employer denies it; the man is brought into court and fined thirty dollars, and in lieu of the money goes back to the same servitude, this time hopeless. A Negro in Alabama makes a contract January 1st and takes $5.00 earnest money, and works until May; the master refuses to give him a house. He works two months more, and then leaves, is arrested for breach of contract, and the courts hold that the acceptance of that five dollars proves that he did not mean to carry out his contract, although he has worked seven months. A woman makes a labor contract; and before it expires marries a man whom she had never met at the time of making her contract; held, that her marriage proves that she did not mean to carry out the contract when she made it, and she is therefore guilty of false pretenses.

Even without a contract a Negro may be legally obliged to labor for a white man under vagrancy laws, by which Negroes who are not visibly supporting themselves may be convicted for that crime, and then sent to the County Farm, or hired out to somebody who will pay their fine. Once in the hands of a master, they are helpless. For instance, one Glenny Helms, who was apparently guilty of no offense, was in 1907 arrested, fined and sold to one Turner, who in this case thought it prudent to plead guilty of peonage. The son of this Turner was the agent in the most frightful case of peonage as yet recorded. A woman was accused of a misdemeanor; it is doubtful whether she had committed any; but at any rate she was fined fifteen dollars; Turner paid the fine; she was a.s.signed to him and he set her to the severe labor of clearing land. And then what happened? What was a hustling master to do with a woman who would not pile brush as fast as the men brought it, but to whip her, and if she still did not reform, to whip her again, and when she still would not do the work, to string her up by the wrists for two hours, and when she still "s.h.i.+rked," G.o.d Almighty at last came to the rescue; she was dead! When they tried to prosecute the man for murder in the state courts, the sheriff of the county (who was in the gang) came to the other slaves who had seen this, as they were summoned to the grand jury, and told them that if they gave any damaging testimony "we will put you in the river." Such things happen occasionally in all civilized lands. As dreadful a crime was committed in Paterson, New Jersey, not many years ago; but there are two differences between the Bosschieter and the Turner cases. Those Jersey murderers were all convicted; that man Turner walks the earth, unmolested, not even lynched.

The public sentiment of New Jersey was clear that an offense against the humblest foreigner was an offense against the Commonwealth; but the blood of that poor black woman cries in vain to the courts of Alabama; and the thousands of people down there who feel furious about such matters are so far helpless.

The states by their statutes of false pretenses are partners in those iniquities, but the federal government has done its best in prosecutions.

Between fifty and a hundred indictments have been brought. Federal Judge Boyd, of North Carolina, said of his district: "There has been evidence here of cruelty so excessive as to put to shame the veriest barbarian that ever lived." Federal Judge Brawley, of South Carolina, has held void an act of that State making breach of labor contract a misdemeanor.

Convictions have been obtained in half a dozen states, and it is altogether likely that the Supreme Court of the United States will confirm this good work by holding invalid all state statutes which attempt to enforce a debt by sending a man to prison, or still more by selling his services to a master.

Here, as in so many other phases of this question, the troublous thing is not that there should be cruelty and oppression or servitude. Gangs of Italians under a padrone in the North are sometimes little better than bondmen. Masters of almshouses and reform schools will sometimes be brutal unless their inst.i.tutions are frequently and carefully inspected. The real difficulty is that the superior race permits its laws and courts to be used for the benefit of cruel and oppressive men; that public sentiment did not prevent the peonage trials by making the cases impossible; that a federal judge in Alabama should be a.s.sailed by members of the bar and members of Congress because he stopped these practices. Peonage is an offense which cannot be committed by Negroes; it requires the capital, the prestige, and the commercial influence of white men.

The federal government has inst.i.tuted investigations of these practices, and a.s.sistant Attorney General Russell has urged the pa.s.sing of such federal statutes as shall distinctly reach these cases of detention; and also the amendment of the state laws so as to take away the authority to transfer the services of anyone from the state to an individual. This last is a reform of which there is especial need. Most of the cases of peonage arise out of the practice of selling the specific services of a convict to an individual; and it carries with it practically the right to compel such a person to work by physical force. What is to be done with a bondman who refuses to touch a hoe, except to whip him, and to keep on whipping him till he yields? The guards and wardens of prisons in the South use the lash freely, but they are subject at least to nominal inspection and control. To transfer the distasteful privilege to a contractor or farmer is to restore the worst incidents of slavery.

Sympathy must be felt for the planters and employers who make their plans, offer good wages, give regular employment, and see their profits reduced or eliminated because they cannot get steady labor. Much of the peonage is simply a desperate attempt to make men earn their living. The trouble is that n.o.body is wise enough to invent a method of compelling specific performance of a labor contract which shall not carry with it the principle of bondage. Men enlisted in the army and navy may be tracked, arrested, and punished if they break their contracts--but they cannot be lashed into shouldering a gun or cooking a meal. Sailors are, by the peculiar conditions of isolation at sea, subject to being put in irons for refusing to obey an order--but the cat has disappeared from the legal arguments to do their duty. It is the concomitant of freedom that the private laborer shall not be compelled to work by force; there is no way by which the South can cancel that triumph of civilization, the exercise of free will. When will people learn the good old Puritan lesson that the power to do well involves the power to refuse well doing? That you cannot offer the incitement of free labor without including the possibility of the laborer preferring to be idle?

CHAPTER XXI

WHITE EDUCATION

"The most progressive nations have now definitely come to the conclusion that there is no mode of increasing industrial and commercial efficiency so effective as universal education sufficiently prolonged to effect permanent improvement in the observing and reasoning powers of the children." So said that primate of American education, President Eliot, in an address at Tuskegee, Ala. Though speaking before an audience chiefly composed of colored people, he was laying down a general principle, for he goes on to say that in the Southern states "for both whites and blacks the school time is too short; a large proportion of the children leave school at too early an age; well-trained teachers are lacking; and the range and variety of accessible instruction are too small. Hence a large proportion of both the white race and the black race in the South are in urgent need of better facilities for education."

This is one point of view; at the other extremity stand such men as a Southern editor who has recently written, "As an educational influence the investment of $100,000 in a cotton mill is worth ten times the $100,000 given a Southern college." What does the South as a whole think on this question of education? What are its needs? What has it so far done? What is it prepared to do? How does education affect the race question?

Throughout the South there has been and still persists an excellent tradition of reading and of education among the cla.s.ses which may be presumed to afford such advantages for their children. Cla.s.sical allusions and quotations from Scripture and Shakespeare are still recognized by all well-educated men. Some of the few fine old plantation houses contain elegantly appointed libraries, stopping short, however, at the year 1836, or whenever the owner died. The city of Charleston has better bookstores than the city of Albany. Probably more people in North Carolina can comment on Shakespeare than in Maine; and the man who can read Horace without a pony and quote Greek without looking at the book is a public character. Besides this admiration for an old-fas.h.i.+oned learning that is now pa.s.sing, the South feels a genuine and lively interest in what goes on in the world. The present generation of fairly well-to-do people travel more, see more, read more that is written in their own time, think more than did their fathers and grandfathers. They feel a genuine interest in education, put intelligent thought on methods, show respect for the colleges, are willing to spend money on schools.

Like England in the Eighteenth Century the South abounded in readers of good literature, while the land was full of ignorance. Though in early Virginia suggestions were made for free common schools, and Thomas Jefferson strenuously advocated them, though in the forties and fifties several Southern states had elaborate paper systems of schools, outside the large cities there were no graded schools open to all white children such as were familiar in the North after 1840. Even New Orleans waited for good school buildings till the fortunate bequest of McDonogh; as for free rural schools, not a single Southern state had organized and set in operation a system before the Civil War. From the first the spa.r.s.e settlement of the South, the presence of the Negro, and the lack of that commercial connection with the rest of the world which so arouses the human mind, made it difficult and perhaps impossible to found a system of general popular education in that region.