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"Ah, if that were all!" he said; "but even in peonage we are not left undisturbed! It was only a year ago that I was riding into town on my donkey with some chickens to sell, when an officer stopped me and brought me before the Jefe Politico. "'Why have you not obeyed the law? said the magistrate. 'I know of no law that I have not obeyed, I said.
For remedying it by the enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment bills have been frequently presented in Congress, but on these no action has been taken. Economic Life: Peonage Within fifteen years after the close of the war it was clear that the Emancipation Proclamation was a blessing to the poor white man of the South as well as to the Negro.
The system of peonage in New Mexico had been abolished with the abolition of slavery in the United States, but the peons did not realize the wretchedness of their deplorable social status, and in their ignorance they regarded their bondage as a privilege, believing themselves fortunate to have their wants provided for by their patrones.
These coolies, whom the labor agents attract with promises of high wages, a delightful climate, unlimited opium, and other things dear to the Chinese heart, are employed under an indenture system, the duration of their contracts being limited by law to three hundred days. That sounds, on the face of it, like a safeguard against peonage. The trouble is, however, that it is easily circumvented.
Moreover, when an English mediaeval peasant refused to labor for his three pence a day he might be sent to gaol by the nearest justice of the peace, as, perhaps, some employers would like to do to-day in our South, and which resulted if not in slavery in precisely that condition which we call "peonage."
He divides his cases into four divisions: The Negro lynched, The Negro held in peonage, The Negro driven out by organized lawlessness, and The Negro subject to individual acts of cruelty. "In some counties," he says, "the Negro is being driven out as though he were a wild beast. In others he is being held as a slave.
While a million Irishmen died of hunger on the most fertile plains of Europe, English Imperialism drew over one thousand million pounds sterling for investment in a world policy from an island that was represented to that world as too poor to even bury its dead. The profit to England from Irish peonage cannot be assessed in terms of trade, or finance, or taxation.
They made contracts with this firm to handle the sixty-eight cases at fifty dollars each in cash and a percentage of the moneys collected from the white planters. Some of the Negroes also planned to go before the Federal Grand Jury and charge certain planters with peonage.
To-day when I hear orators rolling out the word "slavery" in connection with American wages and working conditions, I have to laugh. For any man who has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery.
Fifty years later, in 1913, there were in the United States ten and a quarter million persons of Negro descent, an increase of one hundred and five per cent. Legal slavery has been abolished leaving, however, vestiges in debt slavery, peonage, and the convict lease system. The mass of the freedmen and their sons have Earned a living as free and partially free laborers.
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