Negro’s interests, however, these laws were "black," not only in name and aim but in their very nature. Instead of being the property of a personally interested master, the Negro was to be converted into the slave of a much less sympathetic society in general. The "free" Negro’s lot was to be much harder than that of the slave had been; for altho no longer entitled to "board and keep" from his employer, yet he was to be forbidden by law to move or to change his employment. This would have left his wages at the mercy of the employer. It is a law of economics that the mobility of labor is necessary to the normal regulation of wages. Some states absolutely forbade the freedmen to engage in skilled work, leaving for them only the most menial and least profitable occupations. In the famous old state of South Carolina the employer was to be allowed to inflict corporal punishment, or as the euphemism of the law put it, to "moderately correct" the servants. "Master" and "servant" were the terms used in these laws,—not employer and employee. The vagrancy laws and laws of apprenticeship were all of a nature to entrap the ignorant and take advantage of the weak. Famous old South Carolina even sought to regulate the amount of "politeness" due from the "servant" to the "master’s family." In the face of all these stereotyped facts, why should any honest student of history have to resort to any intangible and indefinite thing like a feeling of revenge or a desire for political and party advantage as an explanation of the motives of those who conceived and passed by the Fourteenth Amendment? This Amendment was passed by the friends of freedom to keep the Thirteenth Amendment from being a mere farce. They sought thereby to secure for the Negro the protecting power of the ballot, as the only effective means of influencing his civil and political interests in a government like this. There was no thought or hope of making him dominant in a country that was predominantly white. But the backers of the Amendment sought to lead the state governments to this reasonable end by inducing rather than by compelling them. The effect of this amendment was to be based on impartial mathematics, and the choice was to be left to the majority of voters of the state. The state was simply not to have a power in the national government based on a population which the state itself did not recognize as a part of its own citizenry.