Within the enclosures my friend and her people, no matter how enlightened or refined they may be, are herded, and under the same rules, as so many animals.  They cannot leave the enclosure without passes, such as were granted to our slaves before the war when they wished to go outside of the plantation.  This woman, when seated at President Hayes’s table, the equal in mind and breeding of any of her companions, was, by the laws of her country, a runaway, legally liable to be haled by the police back to her enclosure, and shot if she resisted.  She and her people are absolutely unprotected by any law.  It is indeed the only case, so far as I know, in any Christian country, in which a single class are so set aside, unprotected by any law.  When our slaves were killed or tortured by inhuman masters, there was at least some show of justice for them.  The white murderer went through some form of trial and punishment.  The slave, though a chattel, was still a human being.  But these people are not recognized by the law as human beings.  They cannot buy nor sell; they cannot hold property:  if with their own hands they build a house and gather about them the comforts of civilization and the wife and children to which the poorest negro, the most barbarous savage, has a right, any man of the dominant class can, without violating any law, take possession of the house, ravage the wife and thrust the children out to starve.  The wrong-doer is subject to no penalty.  The victim has no right of appeal to the courts.  Hence such outrages are naturally of daily occurrence.  Not only are they perpetrated on individuals, but frequently there is a raid made upon the whole of the inmates of one enclosure—­whenever, in fact, the people in the neighborhood fancy they would like to take possession of their land.  The kinsmen of my friend, with their clan numbering some seven hundred souls—­a peaceable, industrious Christian community, living on land which had belonged to their ancestors for centuries—­were swept off of it a few years ago at the whim of two of their rulers:  their houses and poor little belongings were all left behind, and they were driven a thousand miles into a sterile, malarious region where nearly half of their number died.  The story of their sufferings, their homesickness and their despair on the outward journey, and of how still later some thirty of them returned on foot, carrying the bones of those who had died to lay them in their old homes, is one of the most dramatic pages in history.  De Quincey’s “Flight of a Tartar Clan” does not equal it in pathos or as a story of heroism and endurance.  At the end of their homeward journey, when almost within sight of their homes, the heroic little band were seized by order of the ruler of their enclosure and committed to prison.  The tribe are still in the malarious swamps to which they were exiled.  Strangers hold their farms and the houses which they built with their own hands.