The seventh section provides that a fee of $10 shall be paid to each commissioner in every case brought before him, and a fee of $5 to his deputy or deputies “for each person he or they may arrest and take before any such commissioner,” “with such other fees as may be deemed reasonable by such commissioner,” “in general for performing such other duties as may be required in the premises.”  All these fees are to be “paid out of the Treasury of the United States,” whether there is a conviction or not; but in case of conviction they are to be recoverable from the defendant.  It seems to me that under the influence of such temptations bad men might convert any law, however beneficent, into an instrument of persecution and fraud.

By the eighth section of the bill the United States courts, which sit only in one place for white citizens, must migrate with the marshal and district attorney (and necessarily with the clerk, although he is not mentioned) to any part of the district upon the order of the President, and there hold a court, “for the purpose of the more speedy arrest and trial of persons charged with a violation of this act;” and there the judge and officers of the court must remain, upon the order of the President, “for the time therein designated.”

The ninth section authorizes the President, or such person as he may empower for that purpose, “to employ such part of the land or naval forces of the United States, or of the militia, as shall be necessary to prevent the violation and enforce the due execution of this act.”  This language seems to imply a permanent military force, that is to be always at hand, and whose only business is to be the enforcement of this measure over the vast region where it is intended to operate.

I do not propose to consider the policy of this bill.  To me the details of the bill seem fraught with evil.  The white race and the black race of the South have hitherto lived together under the relation of master and slave—­capital owning labor.  Now, suddenly, that relation is changed, and as to ownership capital and labor are divorced.  They stand now each master of itself.  In this new relation, one being necessary to the other, there will be a new adjustment, which both are deeply interested in making harmonious.  Each has equal power in settling the terms, and if left to the laws that regulate capital and labor it is confidently believed that they will satisfactorily work out the problem.  Capital, it is true, has more intelligence, but labor is never so ignorant as not to understand its own interests, not to know its own value, and not to see that capital must pay that value.

This bill frustrates this adjustment.  It intervenes between capital and labor and attempts to settle questions of political economy through the agency of numerous officials whose interest it will be to foment discord between the two races, for as the breach widens their employment will continue, and when it is closed their occupation will terminate.