The Northern Republicans professed to see in this new legislation at the South the virtual re-enslavement of the negroes. This was an extreme view of it, although it certainly did not give the negro equal civil right with the white man, or anything approaching that, to say nothing of failing to offer him any prospects of ever participating in political functions. Of course it would be an abstract assumption to say that the negro ought, at the moment of his emancipation, to have had equal civil right with the white man. Civilized man can be safely {53} intrusted with a much larger civil liberty than the barbarian or the semi-barbarian. There is no question also that much severer penalties for the commission of the same crime are necessary among a barbarous race or class than among a civilized race or class. From these points of view this Mississippi legislation does not appear as far from what was natural and even necessary as Mr. Stevens and his followers made it out. The law of apprenticeship was not severe, and, if justly and sincerely executed, it would probably have been beneficial to the young negroes, deprived of the care given them up to that time by master or mistress, and now thrown upon themselves without a cent of money or a particle of property, most of them knowing no parent except a mother as poor as themselves, and entirely unacquainted with the new conditions of life now confronting them. The law of vagrancy was severer. But it is easy to see that a reasonable execution of that law had as much help as harm in it for the former slave. It would have preserved him against idleness, drunkenness, and thievery, although it did curtail largely his liberty of action. It was, undeniably, the third act, which came so near to the re-enactment of the old slave code in regard to crimes and misdemeanors committed by negroes, that gave the greatest offence. Almost every act, word, or gesture of the negro, not consonant with good taste and good manners, as well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor, for which he could first be fined by the magistrates, and then consigned to a condition almost of slavery for an indefinite time, if he could not pay the fine. There is no question that the "States" of the Union had at that moment the power under the Constitution of the United States to do these things. At that time the determination of the criminal law, both {54} as to the definition of crime, the fixing of penalties, and the fashioning of procedure, was almost entirely a function of the "States," and there was no provision in the Constitution of the United States which required the "States" to treat their own inhabitants with equality in regard to their civil rights and obligations.