It is a remarkable concurrence of historical facts that the opening of the Panama Canal will be precisely the four hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Negro slavery into the Western Hemisphere. Most of those centuries were passed without any alleviation of the condition of the chattel slave. The Liberal and Revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about the downfall of chattel slavery as a system of labor in the civilized world. Immediately succeeding the emancipation of the slave from chattelism, slavery reappeared in a new form. The former slave-holding states enacted a series of so-called "Labor Laws" intended to apply exclusively to the recently emancipated slaves, which at that time so outraged public sentiment that the American nation just emerged from the great war, intending to destroy every vestige of slavery and its incidents, conferred upon the Negro the common and universal legal rights which pertained to white men throughout the English speaking world. It was evidently the thought and purpose of the men of that day to cure in the light of the formulas and promises of their fundamental charters the curse that had been a sore to civilization for years. And for a time it looked as though they had done so, but of late years there has grown up a series of laws and court decisions giving distinct recognition to the fact of Race, and in spite of the constitutional guaranties, differentiating at least in the matter of the enjoyment of rights as between white men and black men. This paper is concerned merely with those distinctive laws which relate to labor. In all English speaking countries the freedom of labor has been a fundamental principle of the law, and the freedom of contract has been absolutely unlimited and unhampered, as was also the right to abrogate or to disregard the contract of labor on the part of the laborer, there being no remedy of specific performance against him. The failure to observe the contract of employment was never, until recently, regarded as a criminal offense, and the only remedy that the employer had against the employee who willfully or who for good reason or for no reason refused to live up to his contract was an action for damages sustained. Of late years there has grown up in the former slave-holding states of the South a series of laws which abrogate all this well-known and time-honored common law principle.