Under the mortgage system, no matter how industrious or economical the Negro may be, he finds himself at the end of the year in debt to the landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again and again, but seldom with any better result.
He describes the perpetual cycle of debt that traps Black laborers in a state of economic servitude.
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More from Frederick Douglass
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.