The more the commissioners examined, the greater the liabilities of the company grew. On the 1st of October, 1875, a dividend of 20 per cent. was declared; on the 1st of February, 1878, a dividend of 10 per cent. was declared; on the 21st of August, 1880, they declared another dividend of 10 per cent.; and on the 14th of April, 1881, a circular was sent out as a crumb of comfort to the anxious, defrauded, and outraged depositors. It is not enough for history to pronounce the failure of this bank an irreparable calamity to the Colored people of the South; it should be branded as a crime! There was no more necessity for the failure of this bank than for the failure of the United States Treasury. Its management was criminal; and Congress should yet seek out and punish the guilty; and the depositors should be indemnified out of the United States Treasury. Justice and equity demand it.

The failure of the Freedman's Bank worked great mischief among the Colored people in the South. But hardy, persistent, earnest, and hopeful, they turned again to the work of making and saving money. They have been more prudent than their circumstances, in some instances, would seem to warrant. In Georgia the Colored people have made wonderful progress in business matters.

Polls.No. of Acres
of Land.		Value of Land.City or Town
Property.		Amount of
Money and
Solvent
Debts of
all Kinds.		Household
and
Kitchen Furniture.
88,522541,199$1,348,758$1,094,435$73,253$448,713
Horses,
Mules, Hogs,
Sheep, and
Cattle.		Plantation
and
Mechanical Tools.		Value of all
other Property,
not before Enumerated,
except Annual Crops,
Provisions, etc.		Aggregate
Value of
Whole Property.		Total Amount
of Tax Assessed
on Polls
and Property.
$1,704,230$143,258$369,751$5,182,398$106,660.39
Increase in number of acres since return of 187839,309
Increase in wealth since return of 1878$57,523

In Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and in Maryland, Colored men have possessed themselves of excellent farms and moderate fortunes. In Baltimore a company of Colored men own a ship dock, and transact a large business. Some of the largest orange plantations in Florida are owned by Colored men. On most of the plantations, and in many of the large towns and cities Colored mechanics are quite numerous. The Montgomeries who own the plantation, once the property of Jefferson Davis, extending for miles along the Mississippi, are probably the best business men in the South. In Louisiana, P. P. Deslonde, A. Dubuclet, Hon. T. T. Allain, and State Senator Young are men who, although taking a lively interest in politics, have accumulated property and saved it.

There is nothing vicious in the character of the Southern Negro. He is gentle, affectionate, and faithful. If it has appeared, through false figures, that he is a criminal, there is room for satisfactory explanation. In 1870, out of a population, of persons of color, in all the States and Territories, of 4,880,009, there were only 9,400 who were receiving aid on the 1st of June, 1870; and only 8,056 in all the prisons of America. Nine tenths of these were South, and could neither read nor write.

During the Rebellion, when every white male from fifteen to seventy was out fighting to sustain the Confederacy—when the Southern Government was robbing the cradle and the grave for soldiers—the wives and children of the Confederates were committed to the care and keeping of their slaves. And what is the verdict of history? That these women were outraged and their children brained? No! But that during all those years of painful anxiety, of hope and fear, of fiery trial and severe privation, those faithful Negroes toiled, not only to support the wives and children of the men who were fighting to make slavery national and perpetual, but fed the entire rebel army, and never laid the weight of a finger upon the head of any of the women or children entrusted to their care! To this virtue of fidelity to their worst enemies they added still another, loyalty to the Union flag and escaping Union soldiers. All night long they would direct the lonely, famishing, fainting, and almost delirious Union soldier in a safe way, and then when the night and morning met they would point their pilgrim friends to the North Star, hide them and feed them during the day, and then return to the plantation to care for the loved ones of the men who starved Union soldiers and hunted them down with bloodhounds! This is the brightest gem that history can place upon the brow of the Negro; and in conferring it there is no one found to object.

Since the war the crime among Colored people is to be accounted for upon two grounds, viz.: ignorance, and a combination of circumstances over which they had no control. It was one thing for the Negro to understand the cruel laws of slavery, but when he found himself a freeman he was not able to know what was an infraction of the law. They did not know what in law constituted a tort, or a civil action from a sled. The violent passions pampered in slavery, the destruction of the home, the promiscuous mingling of the sexes, a conscience enfeebled by disuse, made them easy transgressors. The Negro is not a criminal generically; he is an accidental criminal. The judiciary and juries of the South are responsible for the alarming prison statistics which stand against the Negro. It takes generations for men to overcome their prejudices. With a white judge and a white jury a Negro is guilty the moment he makes his appearance in court. It is seldom that a Negro can get judgment against a white person under the most favorable circumstances. The Negroes who appear in courts are of the poorer and more ignorant class. They have no funds with which to employ counsel, and have but few intelligent lawyers to come to their rescue. In cases of theft, especially of poultry, pigs, sheep, fruit, etc., it is next to impossible to convince a white judge or jury that the defendant is not guilty. They reason that because the half-fed, overworked slave appropriated articles of food, as a freeman the Negro was not changed. They ascribed a general habit, growing out of trying circumstances, to the Negro as a slave that he soon learned to regard as morally wrong when a freeman.

But the most effective agency in filling Southern prisons with Negroes has been, and is, the chain-gang system—the farming out of convict labor. Just as great railway, oil, and telegraph companies in the North have been capable of controlling legislation, so the corporations at the South which take the prisoners of the State off of the hands of the Government, and then speculate upon the labor of the prisoners, are able to control both court and jury. It has been the practice, and is now, in some of the Southern States, to pronounce long sentences upon able-bodied young Colored men, whose offences, in a Northern court, could not be visited with more than a few months' confinement and a trifling fine. The object in giving Negro men a long term of years, is to make sure the tenure of the soulless corporations upon the convicts whose unhappy lot it is to fall into their iron grasp. In some of the Southern States a strong and healthy Negro convict brings thirty-seven cents a day to the State, while he earns a dollar for the corporations above his expenses. The convicts are cruelly treated—especially in Georgia and Kentucky;—their food is poor, their quarters miserable, and their morals next to the brute creation. In many of these camps men and women are compelled to sleep in the same bunks together, with chains upon their limbs, in a promiscuous manner too sickening and disgusting to mention. When a prisoner escapes he is hunted down by fiery dogs and cruel guards; and often the poor prisoner is torn to pieces by the dogs or beaten to death by the guards. No system of slavery was ever equal in its cruel and dehumanizing details to this convict system, which, taking advantage of race prejudice on the one hand and race ignorance on the other, with cupidity and avarice as its chief characteristics, has done more to curse the South than all things else since the war.