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I should like to speak upon these subjects during the present year, I fear political trickery is occupying the time of the wire-pullers, and they will exclude all such discussion from Congress during the Presidential year.
In regard to the condition of the South, comparing the chattel slave and wage systems, the results do not favor the former so far as the employer is concerned. Mr. Stephens dealt in extension on this theme, and stated that the wage system makes labor cheaper and more serviceable for the former masters of the South. He based his decision on the power and ability of the worker to consume animal food. In France the average consumption of meat per person is 75 pounds annually, in Germany 25 pounds, in Ireland 10 pounds, and among the former slaves of the South under the new wage system 50 pounds a year. In ante-War times the master allowed his slave 200 pounds of meat annually, and clothing and the like decreased in a like ratio, making a difference of 300 per cent. unfavorable to the colored people. Mr. Stephens said he understood that thousands of workingmen in the North were out of employment, and were not able to earn sufficient at any time to provide what they should for their families. These same views were made by Jefferson Davis about a year since, who claimed that the colored people were more profit to their employers than before the War, when the care of the sick, dead, and indigent involved considerable expense, now avoided by their masters.
Mr. Stephens is in thorough harmony with may reforms now in progress, and states that the taxation of the United States is more onerous than that of any other country in the world. "The tax on the liquor and tobacco," he said, "consumed by an average poor family in the South amounts to $7.50, and as these people make about $10 a month, over $5 of that amount is consumed in paying taxes to the Government."
Mr. Parsons called the statesman's attention to the fact that, viewed in its philosophical sense, the subject of labor plainly indicated that the system of buying and selling labor was destructive to the fundamental principles of liberty, and this profit-making was what kept the masses down and what made the operations of the colored
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