the North. While they do the work the land- upon the crop made by the tenant," and that lord takes the crop. Progression in evil. The foregoing are fair samples of the tenant laws in all the Southern States. As the conservatives became assured that their control of the legislative was permanent, they regularly eliminated all the just and merciful features of the laws, until they have reached their present tyrannical form and made universal the barbarous practices which are making the States, nominally free, really slave. Outrageous prices exacted. Under the operation of the law the most outrageous extortions are practised on the colored people. They are charged an annual rental of from five to ten dollars an acre often more than the land itself will bring if sold in fee simple. They are charged double for bran, corn, meal, &c., that the same may be had for from the storekeeper who would also pay them a fair price for their produce. But with the landlord's lien covering everything, they can neither sell nor buy except at his pleasure and to his profit. “Only hard on the surface." Senators Voorhees, Vance, and Pendleton, in their report to the Senate on the recent exodus from the South, admit that "the landlord class, for their own protection, procured the passage of the laws giving them a lien 66 upon the surface these laws appeared to be hard.” Yet the committee thought them among the most beneficent of provisions for the blacks. The thousands of colored people striving to get away from their operation seem to think differently—that the laws are hard to the core. 44 Bad men in spite of such good laws. Your committee regret to say that they found it to be frequently the case that designing men, or bad and dishonest men, would take advantage of the ignorance or necessity of the negroes." [P. 6, Senate Report, 693, 1880.] The committee then proceeds to argue that bad men exist everywhere, but ignores the fact that bad men elsewhere are bad in violaton of law, while in the case under consideration the law seems to have been made for bad men; to give them greater facilities for inhumanity. The system breeds bad men. Before the war all the cruelties of slavery were laid on bad men and the overseers. Slavery made these classes, and all its laws were made to protect them in villainy by the good men who reaped the greater part of the profit. So at the present time the lien laws of the South are made to enable the bad men to inaugurate and perpetuate practises which will make the good men's plantations equally profitable. The profit and abomination is universal, and the solid South must endure the just indignation of the civilized world. CHAPTER XIV. The Labor Question. "The Democratic party is the friend of labor and the laboring man, and pledges itself to protect him a ike against the cormorant and the commune."-Delaration 13, Democratic National Platform, 1880. PART I. The Labor Question—Democratic Efforts to Degrade and Brutalize Labor-The Republican Party the True Labor Party. What does the workingman want that the Republican party is not pledged by every tradition and measure to do for him? That party was absolutely born in a fight with the slave power-the power of owned labor, owned by Democrats. And throughout its existence it has ever frowned down and legislated against any and all movements to degrade labor and make it servile. The Democratic party, on the other hand, has not had a thought for the past forty-five years beyond the preservation of the accursed systems of slavery and servile labor. For the right to own slave labor instead of paying "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' that party plunged the nation into a terrible four-year's sectional war. a system of peonage (quite as degrading as For the right to own labor under the old system of slavery), instead of paying "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, that party, in the event of a close electoral majority for Garfield and Arthur, will not hesitate to plunge this nation into all the horrors of a civil war. Out of that threatening civil war the Democratic party, controlled by the South, believes it will come bloodily triumphant, with the old labor ideas of the South dominant over all of the United States. Nothing can be more instructive to the laborer of the North than a brief review of the Southern "idea of labor-an "idea," which, though changed in its practical expression, from slavery in the past to the peonage of the present and future, survives the war, and finds itself voiced in the utterances of such leaders as Wade Hampton, when he recently told the Virginians at Staunton: "I ask you to remember those who have died on your soil, and to remember that THE PRINCIPLES THEY DIED FOR ARE AGAIN ON TRIAL TO-DAY."-Staunton Vindicator (Dem.). PART II. Calhoun, in 1835, had laid down the doctrine that there was a "" HIGHER LAW " than the Constitution, "that the laws of the slaveholding States were paramount to the laws of the general government, for the protection of their domestic institutions," and that in case of conflict, the Constitution must yield to the law of the slaveholder; and here, in 1836, the doctrine of the " IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT was enunand emphatically as it was subsequently by ciated by the Democratic Pickens as distinctly Messrs. Seward and Lincoln in 1856. He as Attitude of the South on the Labor Question-Calhoun's Higher Law-Pickens' declaration that "the White Mechanic and La-sures us that "the only contest in the world is be tween the two systems!" But while Lincoln and borer must become Slaves." Seward believed that in this conflict Freedom would ultimately triumph, the Democratic Pickens very dogmatically maintains that the white Mechanic and Laborer must become SLAVES! In 1835, John C. Calhoun described the Constitution of the United States as merely a compact between sovereign and independent communities or States; and while urging the laws of nations as binding upon the individual States as separate and independent communities, broadly declared that there was a 99 HIGHER LAW than the Constitution for the protection of the peculiar institution. He exclaimed: "Let it be fixed, let it be riveted in every Southern mind, that the laws of the slave-holding States, FOR THE PROTECTION OF THEIR DOMESTIC INSTITUTIONS, are PARAMOUNT ΤΟ THE LAWS OF THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT in regulation of commerce and the mail, and that the latter MUST yield to the former in the event of conflict; and that, if the Government should refuse to yield, the States have a right to interpose, and we [the South] are safe." Calhoun's coadjutors of the press faithfully followed his lead; and by the agitation of the question of slavery, by the most unfounded and slanderous charges against the North, by lying denunciations of the purest men of the country, by the most outrageous and unconstitutional demands impossible to be complied with, emulated all Calhoun's efforts to foment an implacable hatred between the citizens of the North and South, to sow the seeds of an irreconcilable discord and strife between the sections, to plant and drive home the wedge they hoped would finally burst the bonds of our Union. Congress was the seat of their Central Directory for the working of the chief machinery of this traitorous Democratic movement for the destruction of the Union. Mr. Pickens, of S. C., was one of the chief conspirators. In the House of Representatives, in 1836, at the first session of the Twenty-fourth Congress, he said: "I lay down this proposition as universally true, that there is not, nor ever was, a society organized under one political system for a period long enough to constitute an era, where one class would not practically and substantially own another class in some shape or form. Let not gentlemen from the North start at this truth: we are yet, as a people, in our infancy. Society has not yet been pressed down into its classifications. Let us live through an era, and then we shall discover this great truth; all society settles down into Capitalists and Laborers, the FORMER will OWN the LATTER, either collectively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude, as exists in the Southern States of this confederacy. THE ONLY CONTEST IN THE WORLD IS BETWEEN THE TWO SYSTEMS! If Laborers ever obtain the political power cf a country, it is, in fact, in a state of revolution, which must end in substantially transferring property to themselves until they shall become capitalists, unless those who have it shall appeal to the sword and a standing army to protect it. This is the history of all civilized people." PART III. The “irrepressible conflict between genius, wealth and "the mob" on one side, and the hereditary slave-holding "aristocrats" of the South-Democracy declares war against the white Mechanic and Laborer. At the same session of the Twenty-fourth Congress, General Waddy Thompson and Hammond, afterwards Governor of South maintained similar doctrines. Hammond, in Carolina and Senator of the United States, a speech remarkable for its venom and vituLaborer, pronounces slavery "the greatest of perative abuse of the white Mechanic and all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon the glorious "aristocracy," of the South! He enlarges upon what he calls the conflict of genius and wealth with hereditary institutions-in reality, the irrepressible conflict" between Freedom and Slavery. He says: " themselves still unable to cope with the time-hardened "The two [genius and wealth] combined, finding strength of hereditary government, and eager, impatient and almost frenzied to achieve its conquest, have called in to their assistance another ally-the people! Not the 'people' as we have hitherto been accustomed in this country to define that term, but the MOB-the SANS CULOTTES! Proclaiming as their watchword that immortal but now prostituted sentiment, THAT ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL,' they have rallied to their standard the ignorant, uneducated, and semibarbarous mass which swarms and starves upon the face of Europe! Unnatural and debasing union! Hereditary institutions are gone! Already have the nobility of France been overthrown! their days are numbered in the British Empire! Let them go on! I am not their advocate. What next? Confiscation has begun! The end is as obvious as if it were written on the wall. The hounds of Acteon turned upon their master. Genius and wealth, stimulated by an ambition that o'erleaps itself,' have called these spirits from the vasty deep, but they will down no more! The spoils of victory are theirs, and they will gorge and fatten on them!" * * * * * * * 'Against this institution [slavery] war has been commenced!" * "The BANS CULOTTES are moving! On the banks of the Hudson, the Ohio, and the Susquehanna-on the hills and in the vales, and along the iron-bound coasts' of immaculate New England-they are mustering their hosts and preparing for their ravages! Every mail from the North brings fresh news of agitation-every breeze is tainted with it. **** I call upon every slaveholder in this House, and in this country, to mark its fearful progress, and to prepare to meet it. He who falters here or elsewhere, he who shrinks from taking the highest and boldest ground at once, is a traitor! A traitor to his native soil! A traitor to the memory of those from whom he has inherited his rights! A traitor to his helpless offspring who call upon him for protection; and on his head be the blood his treachery or cowardice may cause to flow." Thus also, in 1836, the representatives of Southern Democracy, while proclaiming the doctrine of "a HIGHER LAW " than the Constitution, and that of the "IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT," accompanied it with a declaration of war upon the people! the MOB! the SANS CULOTTES!" the white Mechanic and Laborer! and a denunciation of every Southern man as a traitor or coward who hesitated, at their bidding, to throw out his banner and couch his lance against Freedom and the free white Laborer! Nor for near thirty years did they allow this war to flag! They kept alive the fires of agitation by constantly feeding its flame with the most combustible fuel--all the while trampling upon the plainest provisions of the Constitution, and upon the rights of our citizens and of the States-prostituting the powers of the nation, the blood and treasure of our people, in extending their boundaries, and building up the political power of their despotism-while hypocritically shouting: "Northern Agitation!" "Northern Fanaticism!" "Northern Aggression !" The war of the Democracy upon "the people! the mob! the sans culottes!" the white Mechanic and Laborer, reached its first culmination in 1856 and subsequently. They now even more boldly attacked the freedom and Republican institutions of our country. The easy repeal of the Missouri compromise, in 1854, had only increased their arrogance without satisfying their ambition. Said Keitt, of S. C., in the House of Representatives— "Slavery is a great primordial fact, rooted in the origin of things!" * **"As a corollary to this, it may be safely deduced that the existence of [white) laborers and mechanics in organized societies was the result of the partial and progressive emancipation of slaves." * * ** "History tells us, also, that when the [white] working classes stepped out of bondage, they branched into four recurring subdivisions-the hireling, the beggar, the thief, and the prostitute, which have no general existence in slave countries, unless there have been a commencement of emancipation!" The to the core." 66 Slavery," it said, "is not only natural of origin and right," but "essential to Republicanism." The Richmond Examiner declared that "history, both sacred and profane, shows that slavery is natural and normal;" that "the experience, the practice, and the history of mankind, vindicate slavery, in the abstract, as a natural and conservative institution." The Lynchburg Republican, in a lucid examination of the "awful problem presented by the conflict between capital and labor," tion." With it "slavery is the corner stone pronounced slavery the only practical soluof our Republican institutions," and "the great peacemaker between capital and labor." Charleston Mercury declared that "master and slave is a relation in society as necessary as that of parent and child," and that "the Northern States will have to introduce it: slavery is the natural and normal condition_of_the laboring man whether WHITE or black!" society is a failure," cried the astute Keitt. claimed the dignified Fitzhugh: "two hun"Free society is a monstrous abortion," exdred years of liberty have made white laborers a pauper banditti.' "Men are not born entitled to equal rights: some are born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them, and the riding does them good;" "they need the rein, the bit, and the spur; right and necessary." With the Charleston slavery, WHITE or black, is Mercury "the great evil of Northern free society is, that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers unfit for selfgovernment, yet clothed with all the attributes and powers of citizens." While the Alabama Herald could not suppress its disgust at the abominations of "free society," made up of 66 99 66 66 • Free The small farmers and greasy mechanics," unfit even to attend on a Southern gentleman's body servant." The Charleston Standard, the Richmond South, De Bow's Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, and others, all organs of the Democracy, maintained these debasing doctrines with great persistency and violence. Richmond Enquirer, the leading Democratic journal of the South, while authoritatively declaring that "slavery is a moral, religious, and natural institution, and that the laws of all the Southern States justified the holding of white men in slavery;" announced that "the South now maintains that slavery is right, natural, and necessary;" that "the principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion;" and "that is the doctrine maintained by the whole Southern press "—by the whole Southern Democracy. PART V. Democratic denunciation of free white mechanics as essentially slaves-The negro declared infinitely superior to the white mechanic "morally, socially and physically". "Liberty for the few, slavery for the masses. In the opinion of this Democracy, the wretched victims of "hireling labor society," the 66 white Mechanic and Laborer, differ, in their Labor principles --The Northern Democratic Leaders' Responsibility. Failing to carry out these barbarous plans within the Union, in 1861 these Southern Democrats strove through treason and blood to sever the Union and found a Confederacy of States in which their peculiar principles and plans might be carried out. Under that Confederacy there would have been no free labor -no free laborer. The rich would have been the masters, all others would have been degraded to slavery. Failing to establish their Confederacy, the Southern Democracy determined to secure within the Union, what they could not get without it-to gain control of the Government by strategy where they failed Sagacious to conquer by force. The lion suddenly became the fox. With agitated earnestness the Southern leaders bewailed dead Sumner's taking off and swore to support the Constitution, amendments and all. They slobbered over the North while they bulldozed the South, and thus they grew so rapidly into power and place that they can now almost throw off the mask. They already have their "Confederate Congress. They only need the Presidency and the game is in their hands, to do with labor-white or black-as they will. Nor can Northern Democracy shirk its equal responsibility with the Southern Democracy, not alone for the war but for all that has grown out of it. It was the Northern Democratic Doughfaces that encouraged the South to fight for a (black and white) slave labor system, while they skulked at home. Northern Democratic leaders knew then the principles and purposes of the South, and sympathised and shared them. Northern Democratic leaders know now the principles and purposes of the solid South, without Wade Hampton telling them. The old principles still live, the "lost cause is yet to be won, and the free mechanics of the North to be enslaved under that worse form of slavery now in vogue at the South, to wit, Peonage. "Slavery is the natural and normal condition of the Laborer! "Slavery is right and necessary whether WHITE or BLACK!" Among others, Messrs. Ruffin (in his Political Economy of Slavery) and Fitzhugh (in his Cannibals All, or Who shall be Masters ?) proceeding with the approbation and applause of the South-its whole Democracy--elaborated, what, to them, appeared to be very practical plans for the reformation of "hireling labor society." Mr. Ruffin, after describing what he understands to be their wretched and degraded condition, proposes to reduce the white Mechanic and Laborer to domestic bondage! Such a plan, he argues, would elevate them, morally, socially, and physically. Mr. Fitzhugh, in his Cannibals All, like Mr. Ruffin, enlarges upon the debasement and crime of the white Mechanic and Laborer in a state of freedom. He, too, as a means to their Democratic elevation, proposes to reduce them to slavery. He says that a negro slave is worth about $800; a white slave, by reason of his harder working nature, would be worth $1,000. Give, therefore, the capitalist owning $1,000 one white slave; the capitalist owning $10 000 ten white slaves; and the millionaire a thousand! He exclaims: "LIBERTY for the FEW -SLAVERY in every form for the MASSES!" PART VI. "The Cause being "Lost" the South plays Fox to regain power and carry out its Slave PART VII. annual robbery of Productive Labor, and Demo· cratic cheese-paring—A Crusade against poor Male and Female Laborers. Out of the wealth which labor produces in the year, more than $135,000,000 are paid for pensions and interest on the war debt of the nation, all entailed by the war waged by Southern Democrats, egged on by Northern Democratic Doughfaces, for a slave labor system. The Democratic House during the last five devotion to the laboring years has shown its people" by the cheese-paring policy of cutting down the wages of Government laborers, messengers, and clerks, carefully avoiding any reduction in the pay of its own members. | walk to reach the place assigned to them in Upon the adjournment at nearly every session the galleries of Congress. the streets of Washington have presented the spectacle of crowds of hapless people discharged from the lower grades of service in the departments, while the corridors of the great Government buildings were loud with the wailing of poor women suddenly bereft of all chance to earn a scant livelihood for themselves and dependent families. It may be regarded as the special triumph of this Democratic policy that in this cutting down of the low-priced laborers and clerks, both as to pay and numbers employed, the poor scrubbing women engaged at the public buildings were reduced in the greatest proportion, and many were discharged. At one time even the appropriations for laborers at the Capitol were withheld. So that there was no lawful way in which men enough could be employed to clean up the filth expectorated by the Democracy in the halls through which the wives of Senators, Cabinet officers, foreign ministers, or even the wife of the President, could PART VIII. Wages of the Mechanic and Laborer abroad-Compare these with our own-Valuable tabular statements. Thanks to the present Republican tariff, which the Democratic leaders in Congress have frequently, but without success, assailed, the condition of the mechanic and laborer in America is the envy of his brothers in Europe. Take the following official tables in the letter from the Secretary of State, May 17, 1879, addressed to the Speaker of the House, compiled from the reports of United States consuls, touching the state of labor in Europe; and the American artisan, mechanic and laborer will see what cause for thankfulness he has : Statement showing the Weekly Rates of Wages in the several Countries, compiled from the Consular Reports and compared with Rates prevailing in the United States. |