Failing in that," says he, "our other object was to ask for help to ship us all to Liberia, Africa, somewhere where we could live in peace and quiet. If that could not be done," he adds, "_our idea was to appeal to other governments outside of the United States to help us to get away from the United States and go and live there under their flag_." What a commentary upon our own boasted equality and freedom! Finding no relief in any direction, they finally resolved to emigrate to some of the Northern States. He says they had some hope of securing better treatment at home until 1877, when "we lost all hopes and determined to go anywhere on God's earth, we didn't care where; we said we was going if we had to run away and go into the woods." Perhaps we can best summarize the condition of affairs in Louisiana and the causes of the exodus from that State, as the Negroes themselves regarded them, by quoting a brief extract from the report of the business committee to the colored State convention held in New Orleans on the 21st of April, 1879: NEW ORLEANS, April 21, 1879. _Mr. President_: Your committee on business have the honor to submit this their final report. Discussing the general and widespread alarm among the colored people of Louisiana, including so potent a fear that in many parishes, and in others perhaps largely to follow, there is an exodus of agricultural labor which indicates the prostration and destruction of the productive, and therefore essentially vital, interests of the State. _The Committee find that the primary cause of this lies in the absence of a republican form of government to the people of Louisiana. Crime and lawlessness existing to an extent that laughs at all restraint, and the misgovernment naturally induced from a State administration itself the product of violence, have created an absorbing and constantly increasing distrust and alarm among our people throughout the State. All rights of freemen denied and all claims to a just recompense for labor rendered or honorable dealings between planter and laborer disallowed, justice a mockery, and the laws a cheat, the very officers of the courts being themselves the mobocrats and violators of the law, the only remedy left the colored citizens in many of parishes of our State today is to emigrate. The fiat to go forth is irresistible. The constantly recurring, nay, ever-present, fear which haunts the minds of these our people in the turbulent parishes of the State is that slavery in the horrible form of peonage is approaching; that the avowed disposition of men in power to reduce the laborer and his interest to the minimum of advantages as freemen and to absolutely none as citizens has produced so absolute a feat that