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That's an interesting quote from Douglass. If you follow the reference, it continues > It gives the shopkeeper a customer who can trade with no other storekeeper,
and thus leaves the latter no motive for fair dealing except
his own moral sense, which is never too strong. While the
laborer holding the orders is tempted by their worthlessness,
as a circulating medium, to get rid of them at any sacrifice,
and hence is led into extravagance and consequent destitution. > The merchant puts him off with his poorest commodities
at highest prices, and can say to him take these or nothing.
Worse still. By this means the laborer is brought into debt,
and hence is kept always in the power of the land-owner.
When this system is not pursued and land is rented to the
freedman, he is charged more for the use of an acre of land
for a single year than the land would bring in the market if
offered for sale. On such a system of fraud and wrong one
might well invoke a bolt from heaven red with uncommon
wrath. > It is said if the colored people do not like the conditions
upon which their labor is demanded and secured, let them
leave and go elsewhere. A more heartless suggestion never
emanated from an oppressor. Having for years paid them in
shop orders, utterly worthless outside the shop to which they
are directed, without a dollar in their pockets, brought by
this crafty process into bondage to the land-owners, who can
and would arrest them if they should attempt to leave when
they are told to go. I can think of modern power relations this reminds me of, but an ordinary job in the U.S. is not one of them. |