Thus another is added to the many strange, sad stories in the history of this dark-skinned race. This sudden impulse moving upon this great mass of men and women may not have been reasonable, and yet it must have had a reason. Kansas seems to be to them a magical name, synonymous with freedom, friends and happiness, in their crude thought. It was sought to turn some of them to Iowa, where work and pay were offered; but no, Kansas was the goal from which they could not be turned away. There seems to be no possible interpretation of this so general migration, other than that they have given up in despair the thought of peace or prosperity in their old homes. For of all the inhabitants of our soil they are the least migratory in their nature; they cling to the old State and the old homestead on which they were reared. But repeated wrongs have worked at last on their slow minds the conviction that better things can only be in store for them far away. Not political deprivations, for they seem easily to have given up that contest, and they “don’t vote much;” but the wrongs of a hard tenantry system, by which they have been compelled to rent land at $10 an acre for the year—land worth not much more than that at sale—with various other extortionate charges by the way, bringing the laborer out at the year’s end no better, but rather the worse off for all his toil, and with no liberty even of complaint; these are the things which have at length wrought out their natural and inevitable result. The consequences of this movement, if it be suffered to go on—and who can stop it?—are manifold and of most serious import. The planters are already alarmed at the lack of laborers for the year which is just opening upon them. A desertion of “hands” is a most dire calamity in an agricultural community. Political changes may follow those of population, and if this hegira goes on, the proportion of representation may be seriously changed between Louisiana and Kansas.