A thousand things tend to enhance this absurdity and seeming oppression which the imagination of the thoughtful reader will readily supply. One is the self evident advantage which this state of things gives to the landowners. By it they are enabled to hold large tracts of land, only a small portion of which is cultivated or used in any manner. By refusing to sell on reasonable terms and in small parcels, they compel the freedmen to accept the alternative of enormous rents and oppressive terms, since starvation is the only other that remains to them.
The men who framed these laws were experts in legislation and adepts in political economy. It would perhaps be well for countries which are to-day wrestling with the question: "What shall we do with our poor?" to consider what was the answer the South made to this same inquiry. There were four millions of people who owned no property. They were not worth a dollar apiece. Of lands, tenements and hereditaments they had none. Life, muscle, time, and the clothes that conceal nakedness were their only estate. But they were rich in "days' works." They had been raised to work and liked it. They were accustomed to lose all their earnings, and could be relied on to endure being robbed of a part, and hardly know that they were the subject of a new experiment in governmental ways and means. So, the dominant class simply taxed the possibilities of the freedman's future, and lest he should by any means fail to recognize the soundness of this demand for tribute and neglect to regard it as a righteous exemplification of the Word, which declares that "from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath," they frugally provided:
1. That the ignorant or inept citizen neglecting to list his poll for taxation should be liable to indictment and fine for such refusal or neglect.
2. That if unable to pay such tax and fine and the costs of prosecution, he should be imprisoned and his labor sold to the highest bidder until this claim of the State upon his poverty should be fully redeemed.
3. That the employer should be liable to pay the personal taxes of his employees, and might recoup himself from any wages due to said hirelings or to become due.
4. To add a further safeguard, in many instances they made the exercise of the elective franchise dependent upon the payment of such tax.
Should the effete monarchies of the Old World ever deign to glance at our civil polity, they will learn that taxation is the only sure and certain cure for pauperism, and we may soon look for their political economists to render thanks to the "friends" of the former slave for this discovery of a specific for the most ancient of governmental ills!
The song that has been given shows one of the views which a race having little knowledge of political economy took of this somewhat peculiar but perhaps necessary measure of governmental finance.
The group broke up soon after Nimbus arrived, and Berry, following him upon the porch said, as he laid his banjo in the window:
"Wal, an' what did de Cap'n say 'bout my case 'gin Marse Granville
Sykes?"