REPORT.

The Committee upon Labor and Immigration beg leave to
submit the following Report:

The Committee have given to the subject the anxious
and thoughtful consideration which its paramount impor-
tance demands.

Since the sudden abrogation of our hereditary and patri-
archal system of involuntary servitude, -greatly unsettling -
and demoralizing, as might have been expected, that hitherto
useful and contented class of labor, no subject has arisen of
more immediate and pressing importance to the agricultural
and planting interest of the State.

The black man, naturally kind, amiable and submissive,
is admirably fitted for the servile condition which for two
centuries he has so advantageously occupied in this country,
and under which he has been lifted from a state of barbarism
and heathenism to one of civilization and Christianity. Whe-
ther in his new condition of freeman, he shall be able in the
great race of life to cope successfully with the more active and
enterprising white man, is a problem which time alone can
solve. If we compare his condition in the free States, where
for generations no impediment has existed to his moral and
intellectual improvement, with rare exceptions, we must con-
clude that a retrograde, instead of an advanced condition, is
his unhappy fate. Truthfully and graphically as he was
described by his liberator, President Lincoln, "a houseless,
homeless and landless race," instead of bewildering and in-
toxicating his mind with ideas of learning and literature,
and social and political equality, he had been taught that
work—honest, faithful work—was the first ^reat lesson of
life; and that by work, and work alone, could he gain an
honest livelihood, and lift himself from want and degradation
to independence and respectability. Our jails and peniten-
tiary would not now be filled, as they are, to repletion with
colored criminals, and this Legislature engaged in the difficult
task of seeking foreign labor as a substitute to cultivate our
neglected and unproductive fields, had he riot been so sud-
denly snatched from those to whom he looked for counsel and
protection, and thrown, all unprepared, upon his own unaided
efforts.