But no class has any monopoly of selfishness and while it was most unfortunate for South Carolina, yet it was in accordance with human nature, that one of the first considerations of the class which had seized the reins of power in South Carolina in 1890, was to benefit its own class, by an attempt to perpetuate those very conditions which for eighty years had done more to injure South Carolina than any one thing in her history, and which her wisest sons had unavailingly opposed, viz., the retention of a mass of ignorant, agricultural laborers, reduced as close to the condition of serfs of the soil as it was possible in each period to accomplish; for this is what the law, enacted in most of the cotton States at that date, did in fact bring about, by taxing out of existence those agencies which might have relieved the State of considerable numbers of Negroes. The South Carolina Act, passed December 4, 1891, can stand as typical of this legislation, which was based upon the determination of the white agriculturists of the Lower South, constituting as they did about seventy per cent of the white population, to hobble, well within their reach, cheap Negro labor. Coupled as the passage of such legislation was with the fierce declarations against black brutes, with which the perpetrators of such sought to excuse the numerous lynchings of this period, it was apparent that, while the vengeance was swift in overtaking the blacks who violated white women, the pound of cure was preferred to the ounce of prevention; and so, exposing their women to that risk which seemed inevitable with the tremendous Negro population which abounded in the South, the men who made the laws still clung to cheap Negro labor. It is true that as a whole, in the section covered even by South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the white population had gained upon the Negro population and was at this date but slightly inferior in numbers, amounting to 2,917,000 whites, to 2,966,000 Negroes, in this black belt; but just what proportion of whites were absolutely independent of the Negro agricultural laborer it would be difficult to estimate. That there were then and are now a very great number, who would profit to a very great degree by an assisted emigration of Negroes, and that these whites were of the class whose women folk necessarily were most exposed to the risk which a juxtaposition of such an immense mass of Negroes presented, growing race prejudice prevented the perception of, and the members of this class lent their influence to this injurious legislation formulated as follows: “No person shall carry on the business of emigrant agent in the State without first having obtained a license therefor from the State Treasurer. Section 2. That the term ‘emigrant agent’, as contemplated in the Act, shall be construed to mean any person engaged in hiring laborers or soliciting emigrants in the State to be employed beyond the limits of the same.