Section 3. That any person shall be entitled to a license, which shall be good for one year, upon payment unto the State Treasurer, for the use of the State, of one thousand dollars in each county in which he operates or solicits emigrants, for each year so engaged. Section 4. That any person doing the business of an emigrant agent without first having obtained such license shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction shall be punished by a fine not less than five hundred dollars and not more than five thousand or may be imprisoned in the county jail not less than four months or confined in the State prison at hard labor not exceeding two years for each and every offense, within the discretion of the Court.”[237] It is doubtful if the injury which had been inflicted upon the South by the vicious Federal legislation of 1868, had, in any way, been greater than by its checking the natural diffusion of the Negroes throughout the Union in consequence of their emancipation and the military overthrow of those opposing such. The effect of the legislation of 1868 had been to direct and stimulate a movement to the South of Northern Negroes and white adventurers which banked up the Negro population there, taught all to consider themselves ladies and gentlemen, a fact which is still apparent in the apparel in which many attempt to perform heavy manual work; and, until they were disbanded in 1890, was most ludicrous, in their military aspirations, as the Kodak by Johnson shows. The overthrow of Reconstruction in 1876, did to some degree produce diffusion and by the Census of 1890 it became noticeable even in South Carolina, where the Negro population was densest, that while the numerical increase of the Negroes was still greater there than the whites, the rate of increase of the former had fallen below the latter. Yet in South Carolina the Negro population still exceeded the white by 226,296, a greater excess than appeared even in Mississippi, a State of greater area and with a more numerous white population, where the excess of the Negro population was but 197,698. [Illustration: NEGRO NATIONAL GUARDSMAN—SOUTH CAROLINA, 1890 Product of Congressional Reconstruction] Under such circumstances it was patent that legislation in either State which tended to restrain the egress of the Negroes, even if temporarily of industrial benefit to the land owners and agriculturists, was against the true interest of the State and the people, and, accordingly, in South Carolina, in the columns of “The Cotton Plant”, the organ of the South Carolina agricultural class of that date, the author of this work began an attack upon the law in a series of articles. Without asserting that it was in response to this agitation, it nevertheless is a fact that closely following upon it, in 1893, the law was amended by the addition of a clause in the nature of a compromise, namely: