Given these premises the economic answer of the South was, from a business standpoint, perfectly sound. The men who, starting poor after a miserable war, went into the development of the South, went in to make money--to use the great American thesis, they were "not in business for their health." They were going to grant to the laborer just as little as they must; the laborer was unused to a system of free labor, he was not a steady workman, he was not a skilled workman, he had been for two or three hundred years driven to his work, he took no pride in his work--how could he take pride in that which hitherto had been the badge of his shame? Now it was not considered the business of the new Southern business man to develop and train the working man. It was his business, as I have said, from the American point of view, to make money. And the consequence was that he evolved a peculiarly ingenious system of land serfdom, which bears many likenesses to the serfdom that replaced slavery in Europe. The land belonged to the landlord--it was rented out to the serf; the serf was nominally free, but as a matter of fact he was not free at all; he was held to his labor: he rose with the morning work bell of slavery days, he was driven to his labor by mounted riders, he was whipped for delinquencies, he received no stipulated return, but on the contrary the owner of the land made the contract, kept the accounts, and gave him enough once or twice a year to make him not too dissatisfied. After a time this changed somewhat; instead of the land owner himself undertaking the advancing of supplies, a third party, the merchant with capital, came in. In order to enforce such a system it needed to be backed by a peculiar law system--therefore the business men went into politics in the South with the same result as when business men go into politics in the North. Things were done quickly and quietly; they were done not for the good of people who had no political voice, but for the good of those who wielded the political power, _i.e._, the business men and land owners. The laws were made to favor the landlord and the merchant and to make it easy to exploit the tenant and laborer.