With all its wrongfulness and its many cruelties, there were ameliorations in the slave system which softened its asperities and enabled vast number of people possessing conscience and character to assume the relation of master.

But in the treatment of the colored man, now proposed, there was absolute heartlessness and rank injustice.

It was proposed to punish him for no crime, to declare the laborer not worthy of his hire, to leave him friendless and forlorn, without sympathy, without rights under the law, socially an outcast and industrially a serf--a serf who had no connection with the land he tilled, and who had none of the protection which even the Autocracy of Russia extended to the lowliest creature that acknowledged the sovereignty of the Czar.
These laws were framed with malignant cunning so as not to be limited in specific form of words to the negro race, but they were exclusively confined to that race in their execution.

It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case.

Loitering around tippling-shops, one of the offenses enumerated, was in far larger proportions the habit of white men, but they were left untouched and the negro alone was arrested and punished.