Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/567

 A Recent Georgia Peonage Case mitted

by accepting money to sup

press a prosecution, the Court' said in part: — “It is said that under the law of Georgia that where a laborer has re ceived advances and fails to work, or, I believe, to use the expression ‘abandon

the crop,’ an arrest is proper. Can it be fairly insisted that these people had abandoned their crop? Is a crop aban doned because it is grassy, and because the plowman on more than one occasion

is seen to sleep in the daytime? Do you recall Sidney Lanier’s poem, ‘We are

mightily in the grass’?

The proper

corrective for that is the eye of the master, and according to the testimony

of_;Dupree, he did not go to the ﬁeld for two weeks at a time. And where is the proof of abandonment? But if they did abandon the crop, I now sol emnly, in the performance of my duty as a judge of the United States courts, and

in obedience to the direct mandate of

529

it is constantly done in the superior courts. Surely not with the assent of the judges of those elevated and most important tribunals. The fruits of the crime belong to the public and not to individuals.

If Clyde and Maud com

mitted burglary, the people of Georgia were entitled to the labors of the one on the public roads, and of the other on the

prison farm.

If they committed cheat

ing and swindling, likewise the fruits

of their labor belonged to the people of Pulaski County and not to Dupree. This whole transaction is utterly ab horrent to law, and if, as claimed, it is constantly done, the investigation here

will at least inform the judiciary and the people of Georgia of how the public by private, and as we have seen criminal

graft, is being deprived of its right to the application of the labor of criminals to the public welfare. . . . "You should try this case, gentlemen, with the same conscientious carefulness,

the Supreme Court of the United States,

the same unswerving integrity as if a

the ﬁnal arbiter of disputed questions

manly young farmer, with his Saxon blood mantling his cheeks, his pride of

under our Constitution and laws, declare to you that the labor law of Georgia which makes the laboring class of our people, black and white, amenable to

penalties and procedures which are not imposed on people engaged in other ‘ occupations, is unconstitutionally null and void, and is no defense to an arrest

sought to be justiﬁed thereby, for such abandonment. “But if the labor law of Georgia was of force, it was not observed. There is no provision in the law which authorizes

a settlement of criminal cases thereunder for the beneﬁt of private parties. An attorney for the defense has stated that

race gleaming through his clear eyes, and his lovely young wife had been the peons save these two humble Africans. They

are perhaps the very least of God's poor unfortunate creatures, but has not the Blessed Master said to us ‘even as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my disciples, ye have done it unto me’?

“Remember that your dear-sighted countrymen, and that the all-seeing eye which in the exquisite metaphor of the Scripture we are told watches the sparrows as they fall, is regarding your action."