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Were Abraham Lincoln able bodily to revisit the United States to-day, how his keen gray eyes would open in amazement, to find that many legitimate fruits of our Union victories had been filched from us; that save the honorable few, who, accepting the legitimate results of the War, were still honestly striving for the success of principles harmonizing with such results, and inuring to the general welfare they who strove with all their might to wreck the Government, were now, through the fraudulent and forcible restriction of voters in their right to vote at the helm of State; that these, who sought to ruin the Nation, had thus wrongfully usurped its rule; that Free-Trade after "running-a-muck" of panic and disaster, from the birth of the Republic, to the outbreak of the Rebellion, with whose failure it should naturally have expired was now reanimated, and stood, defiantly threatening all the great industries of our Land; that all his own painstaking efforts, and those of the band of devoted Patriots who stood by him to free the Southern Slaves, had mainly resulted in hiding from sight the repulsive chains of enforced servitude, under the outward garb of Freedom; that the old Black codes had simply been replaced by enactments adapted to the new conditions; that the old system of African Slavery had merely been succeeded by the heartless and galling system of African Peonage; that the sacrifices made by him including that of his martyrdom had, to a certain extent, been made in vain; that all the sacrifices, the sorrows, the sufferings, of this Nation, made in blood, in tears, and in vast expenditures of time and treasure, had, in some degree, and in a certain sense, been useless; that the Union, to be sure, was saved but saved to be measurably perverted from its grand purpose; that the power which animated Rebellion and which was supposed to have expired in the "last ditch" with the "Lost Cause" had, by political legerdemain and jugglery and violence, been regained; that the time had actually come for Patriots to take back seats, while unrepentant Rebels came to the front; that the Republic still lived, but only by sufferance, with the hands of Southern oligarchs about its palpitating throat a Republic, not such as he expected, where all men are equal before the law, and protected in their rights, but where the rights of a certain class are persistently trampled under foot; that the people of the Northern, Middle, and Western States, observing nothing beyond their own vicinage, so to speak, and finding that each of their own States is still Republican in its form of government, persistently, and perversely, shut their eyes to the election terrorism practiced in the Solid South by, which the 16 solid, Southern States were, and are, solidified by these conspiring oligarchs into one compact, and powerful, political mass, ever ready to be hurled, in and out of Congress, against the best interests of the Nation 16 States, not all "Republican" in form, but many of them Despotisms, in substance, 16 States, misnamed "Democratic," many of them ruled not by a majority, but by an Oligarch-ridden minority 16 States, leagued, banded, bound solidly together, as one great controlling Oligarchy, to hold, in its merciless and selfish hands, the balance of power within this Republican Union; and that these confederated Southern States are now actually able to dictate to all the other States of the Union, the particular man, or men, to whose rule the Nation must submit, and the particular policy, or policies, which the Nation must adopt and follow: "What next?" you ask "What next?"

In the writer's opinion they are never constitutional when applied to corporations, nor are they class legislation when applied to mines, for the reason that it is well known that mines are situated in remote districts where there are few stores, and that the maintenance of a company store has not only led to much cheating but to an actual condition of peonage.

His own Indians, a band of the Yellow Knives, together with an onscouring of Tantsawhoots, Beavers, Dog-ribs, Strongbows, Hares, Brushwoods, Sheep, and Huskies, he holds in abject peonage. Year in and year out he forces them to dig in his mines for their bare existence. Over on the Athabasca they call him Brute MacNair, and among the Loucheaux and Huskies he is known as The-Bad-Man-of-the-North.

It is easy to see how to the African mind the magistrate may appear like an Oriental cadi, and how he may be led to carry out his work as submissively as would the Oriental under similar circumstances. Parsons, 1 N.M. 190; in re Lewis, 114 Fed. 963; Peonage cases, 123 Fed. 671; United States v. McClellan, 127 Fed. 971; United States v.

Maxwell bought all the interest of Miranda and became the largest land owner in the United States. The arable acres of this large estate in the broad and fertile valleys were farmed by native Mexicans. The system existing in the territory at that time was the system of peonage. Lucien Maxwell was a good master, however, and employed about five or six hundred men.

First, 30,000 black men were transported from the refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way of working. Plain, simple instructions went out from Washington, the freedom of laborers to choose employers, no fixed rates of wages, no peonage or forced labor.

"The point, is, whether my father, when he was publicly denouncing the peonage abuses on the San Pablo plantations over a year ago, had actually sold out his stock, as he announced at the time; or whether, as they say here how do they put it? he had simply transferred it to a dummy till the scandal should blow over, and has meanwhile gone on drawing his forty per cent interest on five thousand shares?

Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions, rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better off. They were classified according to their ability to dig coal, not according to the crimes committed. From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had been found guilty of peonage.

The system of Peonage and contracted convict-labor, growing out of the codes of Black laws, were all-sufficient to keep the bulk of the Negro race in practical subjection and bondage.

Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas.