Note 26 — Chapter V · THE BIO-SOCIOLOGISTS.

“Carry industry to a country not given to mechanical production or to any systematic form of labor, employ three-fourths of its inhabitants, give them a taste of education, of civilization, make them feel the power of moral forces even in a slight degree, and the misery of the other fourth can be gauged by the progress of the three-fourths, and a class of paupers and resultant criminals will be observed. We have in our own day a most emphatic illustration of this in the emancipation of slaves in this country (America). Under the old system the negro slave was physically comfortable, as a rule. He was cared for, he was nursed in sickness, fed and clothed, and in old age his physical comforts were continued. He had no responsibility, and, indeed, exercised no skill beyond what was taught him. To eat, to work and to sleep were all that was expected of him, and, unless he had a cruel master, he lived the life that belongs to the animal. Since his emancipation and his endowment with citizenship he has been obliged to support himself and his family, and to contend with all obstacles belonging to a person in a state of freedom. Under the system of villeinage in the old country it could not be said that there were any general poor, for the master and the lord of the manor took care of the laborers their whole lives; and in our Southern towns, during slavery, this was true, so that in the South there were few, if any, poorhouses, and few, if any, inmates of penal institutions. The South today knows what pauperism is, as England learned when the system of villeinage departed. Southern prisons have become active, and all that belongs to the defective, the dependent, and the delinquent classes has come to be familiar to the South.…” “But so far as the modern industrial order superinduces idleness or unemployment, in so far it must be considered as having a direct relation to the causes of crime.”26