“Then the woman shifted her ground. ‘But at least our laborers are free,’ she said. ‘Are they?’ I answered. ‘Are they free to determine for whom they will work or at what wages? Cannot their masters, who are their employers, discharge them at will, when they get old or feeble or otherwise incompetent, and leave them to starve? No master of a Virginia plantation can do that. His neighbors would actually lynch him should he turn a decrepit old negro out to die or even should he deny to him the abundant food and clothing and housing that he gives to the able-bodied negroes who make crops. And,’ I added, for I was excited, ‘this cruelty is not confined to what are ordinarily called the laboring classes. I know a man of unusual intellectual capacity, who has worked for years to build up the fortunes of his employers. He has had what is regarded as a very high salary. But being a man of generous mind he has spent his money freely in educating the ten or a dozen sons and daughters of his less fortunate brother. He is growing old now. He has earned for his master, a thousand dollars for every dollar of salary that he ever received just as all his fellow workers in the business have done. But he is growing old now, and under the strain of night and day work, he has acquired the habit of drinking too much. He hasn’t a thousand dollars in the world as his reward for helping to make this other man, his master, absurdly, iniquitously rich. Yet in his age and infirmity, the other man, luxuriating in his palatial summer home which is only one of the many palaces that other men’s toil late into the night has provided for him, decides that the old servitor is no longer worth his salary, and decrees his discharge. Is there anything so cruel as that in negro slavery? Is that man half so well off as my negro mammy, who has a house of her own and all the food and clothes she wants at the age of eighty, and who could have the service of a dozen negro attendants for the mere asking?’