“According to the census of 1890,” says Mr. Kelly Miller (“Race Adjustment,” p. 97), “the negro constituted only 12 per cent. of the population, and contributed 30 per cent. of the criminals.” But he goes on to say, “No person of knowledge or candour will deny that the negro in the South is more readily apprehended and convicted on any charge than the white offender. The negro constitutes the lower stratum of society, where the bulk of actionable crime is committed all the world over.” On the other hand, Mr. E. G. Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 176) says: “Petty crimes are often forgiven him, and in countless instances the small offences for which white men are quickly apprehended are, in the negro, habitually ignored.” A negro study of negro crime (_Atlanta University Publications_, No. IX.) says, “It seems fair to conclude that the negroes of the United States, forming about one-eighth of the population, were responsible in 1890 for about one-fifth of the crime.” This purports to be a correction of the estimate above quoted by Mr. Kelly Miller. Complete statistics of a later date do not seem to be available; but according to the same publication, negro crime reached its maximum about 1895, when negro convicts numbered 2·33 per thousand of the whole negro population. Since then the percentage has notably decreased. In 1904 it stood at 1·78 per thousand.
Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people, her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white race. And specially must the strictest limits be placed to the freeman’s right to work when and where he will, and even, if it suits him, to refrain from working. The South needs the negro’s labour, and is determined to have it, not on his terms, but on hers. Far more important and wide-reaching than the crime-slavery of the “chain-gang” is the system of debt-slavery or peonage, whereby a negro, becoming hopelessly indebted to a white landlord (and store-keeper), is compelled to spend the remainder of his life in working off a claim which can never be wiped out, because, for his very subsistence, he is forced to be ever renewing it. There is all the less chance of escape as accounts are kept by the landlord or his agent, and the negro is seldom in a position to check them. Until the law comes to the relief of the “peon,” and ceases to traffic in the sweat of the convict, the South, it seems to me, cannot look the negro squarely in the face.