If white people and black people wish to know how to treat each other in all the relations of life, let them study the Bible.  Take for example the business relations of life, the old question of capital and labor, of service and wages.  For the settlement of all questions that grow out of these relations the laws laid down and the principles taught in the Bible, are worth all the “political economies” in the world.  They apply to all races and conditions of men, in all countries and in all times.  They are as needful and useful in New England factories as on Southern plantations.  Free Negroes are not the only underlings in the world, Negro servants are not the only hirelings.  There are thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, domestic servants, mechanics, sewing women, clerks, apprentices, and such like, whose cry for justice against oppression goes up to heaven by day and by night.  “For which things’ sake,” in all lands, “the wrath of God is come upon the children of disobedience.”  Let us here recall some of these half-forgotten laws; they must do us all good.  I know they are needed in the South; I am persuaded that they are needed wherever there are masters and servants.

Having heard a great deal about the condition of the colored people in Louisiana, I decided that it would not be uninteresting to have an authentic statement of that condition by some person fully capable of furnishing the desired information.  I therefore addressed a letter to the Hon. Theophile T. Allain, a colored member of the Louisiana Legislature for Sweet Iberville parish, and a large sugar planter.  From Mr. Allain’s letter I condense the following statement, which will be found to be interesting for many reasons: 

“First,” says Mr. Allain, “I speak as a man of the South, who pays taxes on thirty-five thousand dollars worth of property, and without owing to any man one dollar.  I claim to be well informed as to the condition of the colored people of the South, the people who bear the heat and burden of the day.

“In the cotton section of the South the Negroes are kept in subjugation, and are not permitted to exercise the right of suffrage guaranteed to them by the provisions of the Federal constitution.  In the sugar-growing districts of Louisiana the colored and white people live upon terms of friendship and cordiality.  In these districts there are thousands of colored men, who before the war were slaves, who now pay taxes upon property, assessed in their own names, ranging in value from five hundred to fifty thousand dollars.  They produce principally rice and sugar.  It is a self-evident fact that the labor of the colored men produces two-thirds of all the cotton raised in the South, four-fifths of the sugar, and nine-tenths of all the rice.

“In the cotton sections of Louisiana the colored men work mostly on shares, and here and there some of them have accumulated a little money; but, as a rule, they make fortunes for the landlords and die in poverty because of no fault of their own.  Rent here, as everywhere else, pulls the laborer down, and keeps him down.  What remains to him after the landlord has taken his share, goes to the Jew shopkeepers and other middle men at crossroads, who will not be satisfied with any profit less than one hundred to one hundred and fifty per cent.