this language:

“I have no doubt from my investigations and experiences that the chief support of peonage is the peculiar system of State laws prevailing in the South, intended evidently to compel services on the part of the workingman. From the usual condition of the great mass of laboring men where these laws are enforced, to peonage is but a step at most. In fact, it is difficult to draw a distinction between the condition of a man who remains in service against his will, because the State has passed a certain law under which he can be arrested and returned to work, and the condition of a man on a nearby farm who is actually made to stay at work by arrest and actual threats of force under the same law. The actual spoken threat of an individual employer who makes his laborer stay at work against his will by fear of the chain gang, and the threat of the State to send him to the chain gang whenever his employer chooses to have him arrested, are the same in result and do not seem to me very different in any other way.”

While the principal sources of the practice of peonage are the laws just referred to, yet it has existed and does exist without law. The condition of the colored man in this country is practically that of an outlaw. He is scarcely thought of as having rights. He is distinctly told not to insist upon his rights, but to do his duty; that rights will come as the result of duty well performed. This is in effect to say the laws, the customs, the institutions, which protect and defend other men are not to be invoked by the Negro when in his opinion he needs them. A large group of men who are looked upon after this fashion is at the mercy of any group of men who enjoy in full vigor all that the institutions and government of their country stand for. Therefore, it is not unusual to find that, without any law at all, large numbers of laborers are restrained of their liberty in quarters and in stockades, guarded by men who carry guns and deadly weapons, and though having been convicted of no wrongdoing, are kept in the condition of ordinary criminals. The report of the Attorney General for the year 1907 contains a list of eighty-three complaints of peonage pending in the Department of Justice. These complaints come from every one of the former slave-holding States, with the exception of Missouri, and since the publication of this report cases of peonage have been found in that State. In view of the testimony afforded by the laws on the statute books of the States, the decisions of the courts, the reports of the Department of Justice, and the testimony of persons whose character is a warrant of its truthfulness, the practice of peonage is exactly coterminous with that portion of the territory of the United States in which the institution of chattel slavery formerly existed. When we consider the historic fact that the public opinion of the States embraced in this territory has never considered Negroes as having rights which any one is bound to respect, and that this public opinion has been active in opposing the conferring of all legal rights upon Negroes, and has never ceased to exert itself to divest them of such rights as have been given them, it can not be wondered at that, while slavery no longer exists in this country as a legal institution, it does exist in the opinion, the sentiment, and the practices of the people. It is difficult to determine how extensive the practice of peonage may be or how many victims may be held in its prison house. On this point, Assistant Attorney General Russell says “We have discovered cases of peonage and others have been brought to our attention, we have examined into many and obtained indictments and convictions, but how many cases are in existence is the same kind of a question as though the crime were pension fraud, or counterfeiting, or public land fraud, or fraud on the revenue. Where we have found several cases we may conclude that