The law of Mississippi[116] provided that the same liabilities should rest on Negroes to support their indigents as upon white persons to support theirs. It levied a tax of one dollar upon every freedman, free Negro, or mulatto between eighteen and sixty to go into the Freedmen’s Pauper Fund. If a Negro refused to pay the tax, he might be arrested and hired out till he had worked out the amount. The Southern States between 1865 and 1868 passed many statutes relative to the marital relations of Negroes and to their right to testify in court. But these statutes are to be discussed in later chapters. It may be said, however, in passing, that the district judge, so often referred to in connection with the South Carolina laws, was a special officer whose main duty was to preside over cases and disputes to which Negroes were parties. This chapter has been confined to the early industrial distinctions between the races—that is, to those laws which related to the rights of the Negro as a bread-winner. These are the distinctions brought forward by those who believed in radical reconstruction measures in the South, as an argument for their position. It was urged by such that, unless Congress stepped in and took a hand, the Southern States would reënslave the Negro: they pointed particularly to the laws of Mississippi and South Carolina in confirmation of their contention. And there was apparently good ground for such a view. The laws providing that colored laborers should be called servants and their employers masters, that they should arise at a certain time and work so many hours per day, that they could not leave the premises or receive visitors without the master’s consent, and the like, sounded very much like prescribing the duties and privileges of a slave. But, on the other hand, many of the requirements were for the protection of the Negro. Such, for instance, were the statutes requiring contracts for service to be in writing and the terms of them explained to the Negro; that helpless ex-slaves should not be evicted from their old homes within two years from January 1, 1865; that Negro paupers should be cared for; and that the master must teach his apprentice to read and write, must give him good food and clothing, and treat him humanely. A discussion, however, of the merits of these early laws is out of place here. But it is only fair to remember, in reading them, that the Southern legislatures were, in many instances, only following precedents that had been set by the free States in dealing with free Negroes, and that the States, either Northern or Southern, had not yet looked upon the Negro as a citizen with the rights guaranteed him by the amended Federal Constitution. Industrial conditions in the South were so demoralized by the War and Emancipation that the legislatures considered it imperative upon them to take immediate and positive steps to establish an industrial relation between the races.