They think it a sounder principle of government to equip and maintain vast penal systems—­with chain gangs, schools of crime, depravity and death, than to support schools and churches.  Millions of money are squandered annually to curb crime, when a few thousand dollars, properly applied, would prove to be a more humane, a more profitable preventive.  The poor school teacher is paid twenty-five dollars per month for three months in the year, while the prison guards is paid fifty dollars per month for twelve months—­ninety days being the average length given to teach the child in the school and three hundred and sixty-five being necessary to teach him in the prison, whence he is frequently graduated a far worse, more hopeless enemy of society than when he matriculated.

And the brutality of the convict systems of Southern States is equaled by no similar institutions in the world, if we except the penal system enforced by Russia in Siberia.  The terms of imprisonment for minor offenses are cruelly excessive, while the food and shelter furnished and the punishments inflicted would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a savage.  The convict systems of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Arkansas are a burning disgrace to the Christian civilization which we boast.  Nothing short of a semi-barbarous public opinion would permit them to exist.  Governors have “called attention” to them; legislatures have “investigated” and “resolved” that they should be purified, and a few newspapers here and there have held them up to the scorn and contempt of the world; yet they not only grow worse year by year, but the number of them steadily multiplies.  And so they will.  How is it to be otherwise?  To prevent such ulcerations upon the body you must purify the blood.  You cannot root them out by probing; that simply aggravates them.

A system of misrepresentation and vilification of the character and condition of the Southern Negro has grown up, for the avowed purpose of enlisting the sympathies of the charitable and philanthropic people of the country to supply funds for his regeneration and education, which the government, State and Federal, studiously denies; so that it is almost impossible to form a correct opinion either of his moral, mental or material condition.  Societies have organized and maintain a work among that people which requires an annual outlay of millions of dollars and thousands of employees; and to maintain the work, to keep up the interest of the charitable, it is necessary to picture, as black as imagination can conceive it, the present and prospective condition of the people who are, primarily, the beneficiaries.  The work and its maintenance has really become a heavy strain upon the patience and generosity of the liberal givers of the land—­whose profuse behests have no parallel in the history of any people.  They have kept it up wellnigh a quarter of a century; and it is no disparagement to their zeal to say the tax upon them is becoming more of a burden than a pleasure.  They have done in the name of humanity and of God for the unfortunate needy what the government should have done for its own purification and perpetuity for the co-equal citizen.  And it is high time that the government should relieve the individual from the unjust and onerous tax.