commend favorably to the American mind the principles of conciliation and compulsory arbitration as a just, equitable, and common-sense method of settling labor differences and conflicts. I THE PROBLEM FIFTY years ago, the American negro was but a few generations removed from savagery. At that time he was living in a state of slavery, wherein every aspiration toward a higher life and every inclination to improve himself, morally or intellectually, were crushed out by his master. Marriage, according to the Christian idea, was practically unknown,1 and when contracted was neither recognized nor protected by law, the sale of a slave away from his home and family being "a virtual decree of divorce and so recognized, not only by usage, but by the deliberate decree 1 Major Sargent, in an appendix to a report to the Freedmen's Bureau on his district in Arkansas, gives extracts from the order book of a Mr. C., a planter in that State. The book contains instructions to his overseer, and was found in his house, which he had abandoned on the approach of the Union forces. One extract is as follows: "The plantation is to produce 400 bales of cotton, 40,000 pounds of pork, 50 stacks of oats, 75 stacks fodder, 8 stacks millet, ten Negro Children." He then arranges for producing the children by ordering the pairing of “Henry and Susan, Cambridge and Matilda, Sandy and Yellow Kitty," etc. |