the question seems to be in a measure solved; but it is alleged to be almost impossible to get the necessary labor from negroes when done for others, under contract or otherwise.  There is, therefore, a mass of recent legislation in the Southern States which we may entitle the peonage laws, which range from the highly objectionable and unconstitutional statute compelling a person to carry out his contract of labor under penalty as for a misdemeanor, to the more ingenious statutes which get at the same result by the indirect means of declaring a person guilty of breaking a contract under which he has acquired money or supplies punishable as for fraud.  There are also statutes applying and very greatly extending the old common-law doctrine of loss of service; making it highly criminal for a neighbor to incite a servant or employee to break his contract or even to accept the work of a laborer without ascertaining that he has not broken such contract, as, for instance, by a certificate of discharge from his last master.  These laws, it will be seen, differ in no particular from the early labor laws in England, which we carefully summarized for this purpose; except, indeed, that they do stop short of the old English legislation which provided that when a laborer broke his contract or refused to work he could be committed before the nearest magistrate and summarily punished.  Even this result, however, has been arrived at by the more circuitous and ingenious legislation of Southern States such as in Georgia, cited in the charge to the Grand Jury.[1] The principle of this elaborate machinery is always that money advances, or supplies, or a lease of a farm for a season or more, or the loan of a mule, having first been made under written contract to the negro, the breaking of such contract or the omission to repay such advances, is declared to be in the nature of fraud; the entering into such contract with intention to break it is declared to be a misdemeanor, etc., etc.  The negro refusing to carry out his labor contract is then cited before the nearest magistrate, who imposes under the statute a nominal fine.  The negro, being of course unable to pay this fine, is remanded to the custody of his bondsmen, who pay it for him, one of them of course being the master.  The negro leaves the court in custody of his employer and carries away the impression with him that he has escaped jail only by being committed by the court to his employer to do his employer’s work, an impression possibly not too remote from the fact.  It is easy to see how to the African mind the magistrate may appear like an Oriental cadi, and how he may be led to carry out his work as submissively as would the Oriental under similar circumstances.

[Footnote 1:  Jaremillo v. Parsons, 1 N.M. 190; in re Lewis, 114 Fed. 963; Peonage cases, 123 Fed. 671; United States v. McClellan, 127 Fed. 971; United States v. Eberhard, 127 Fed. 971; Peonage cases, 136 Fed. 707; charge to jury, 138 Fed. 686; Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275; Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207; Vance v. State, 57 S.E. 889, Bailey v. Alabama, 211 U.S. 452; Torrey v. Alabama, 37 So. 332.]