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The Orange River Colony has severe laws concerning the labor of the blacks, of a nature resembling our peonage laws in the Southern States. Similar conditions seem to lead to similar legislation throughout the modern world.
He saw in it the possibilities of a staunch support to his throne, and therefore not only sanctioned the project, but encouraged it with large grants of land, inspirited the promoters with titles of nobility, and, in addition, instituted a system of peonage, expecting that the silver hook thus baited would be largely swallowed by the Southern people.
In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically forced into peonage. It was a case of "out of the frying pan into the fire."
The very men who were set to watch over their interests, by enticing them into debts which they would not pay, changed their legal freedom into a peonage, which was actual, and too often life-long, slavery. Says Chevalier, "These functionaries acquired for themselves troops of slaves.
They adjusted taxation to suit themselves, assessing their own huge estates at figures nothing short of ridiculous, while levying heavily upon the small farmer, and especially upon enterprise and improvements. They practised peonage, though peonage is contrary to the Constitution of the Republic, to the Federal laws, and, in many cases, to the laws of the separate states as well.
They could, while bearing the name of freeman, be legally subjected to all the oppressive features of serfdom, peonage, and feudalism combined, without possessing the right to claim, much less the power to exact, any of the prerogatives and amenities belonging to either of those systems of human bondage.
Indeed, it was not until 1914 that a form of peonage which had long been authorized in Java was abolished by law, for up to that year private landowners had the right to enforce from all the laborers on their estates one day's gratuitous work out of seven. There are no shrewder or more capable business men to be found anywhere than the Dutch traders and merchants in Java.
In 1873 amendments to the constitution declared Church and State absolutely separate and provided for the abolition of peonage a provision which was more honored in, the breach than in the observance. During the half century that had elapsed since 1826, the nations of Hispanic America had passed through dark ages.
He held that before men's consciences had been liberated by the teaching of Christ, they were not qualified for exercising true Christian liberty, and their violent proceedings were nothing but carnal license. Everybody knows how deeply Luther himself was interested in the abolition of the idolatrous Mass and the spiritual peonage which Rome had created for men by means of the confessional.
Yet among these gaudily dressed women and men with the luster of wealth and ease upon them, others mingled. Others of a lower class, poorly dressed, with the badge of servitude upon them, enthralled in a social peonage which I did not yet understand. "Slaans," Wolfgar called them. A term half of derision, half contempt. And Wolfgar pointed one out to me.
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