Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/344

320 priests. (Fine for violating this provision $5, or five days work on the public road or corporal punishment.)

No negro shall be permitted to preach, exhort or otherwise declaim to congregations of colored people without special permission in writing from the president of the Police Jury. (Fine $10 or ten days work or corporal punishment.)

No negro shall sell, barter or exchange any article of merchandise without the special written permission of his employer, specifying the articles of sale or barter or traffic. (Fine $1 for each offense, forfeiture of said articles, or work on the public road or corporal punishment.)

All the foregoing provisions shall apply to negroes of both sexes.

It shall be the duty of every citizen to act as a police officer for the detection of offenses and the apprehension of offenders who shall be immediately handed over to the proper captain or chief of patrol.

The aforesaid penalties shall be summarily enforced, and it shall be the duty of the captains and chief of patrol to see that the aforesaid ordinances are promptly executed.

Evidently the condition of the person laboring under such ordinances would be, if not slavery in terms, some thing closely akin to it. Under such a regime the negro, if only temporarily the slave of an individual owner, would always have been the slave of the white people at large. When, as was provided in some of the ordinances, “every citizen,” meaning, of course, every white man, was authorized and commanded “to act as a police officer for the detection of such offenses and the apprehension of such offenders,” and when such “penalties were to be summarily enforced,” and it was put in the power and made the duty of captains and chiefs of patrol to see that the aforesaid ordinances were promptly executed, the freedman in name was little, if at all, better than a slave in fact.

The men who designed and formulated such ordinances, which in a somewhat changed form reappeared in the