102 Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people, her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white race. And specially must the strictest limits be placed to the freeman’s right to work when and where he will, and even, if it suits him, to refrain from working. The South needs the negro’s labour, and is determined to have it, not on his terms, but on hers. Far more important and wide-reaching than the crime-slavery of the “chain-gang” is the system of debt-slavery or peonage, whereby a negro, becoming hopelessly indebted to a white landlord (and store-keeper), is compelled to spend the remainder of his life in working off a claim which can never be wiped out, because, for his very subsistence, he is forced to 103be ever renewing it. There is all the less chance of escape as accounts are kept by the landlord or his agent, and the negro is seldom in a position to check them. Until the law comes to the relief of the “peon,” and ceases to traffic in the sweat of the convict, the South, it seems to me, cannot look the negro squarely in the face. 103 Many Southerners, even the not unthoughtful or inhuman, make it the first and last word of their philosophy that “the nigger must be taught to know his place.” This means, on analysis, simply that he must accept his position as a serf. But no more than slavery, I take it, is serfdom permanently possible in a modern democratic State; and in so far as she fails to recognize this, the South is once more trying to put back the hands of Time. 27. “Two systems of controlling human labour which still flourish in the South are the direct children of slavery. These are the crop-lien system and the convict-lease system. The crop-lien system is an arrangement of chattel mortgages, so fixed that the housing, labour, kind of agriculture and, to some extent, the personal liberty of the free black labourer is put into the hands of the landowner and merchant. It is absentee landlordism and the ‘company-store’ systems united. The convict-lease system is the slavery in private hands of persons convicted of crimes and misdemeanors in the courts.”—Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. p. 2. 28. On
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