dispensation of his master. No matter how cruelly his master ill-treated him, however dissatisfied he was, the apprenticed laborer in law had no rights. Almost every day the newspapers of the eighteenth, and the early part of the nineteenth, century contained offers of rewards for the apprehension of fugitive apprentice laborers; from a survey of the Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and other colonial and state newspapers it is clear that thousands of these apprentices had to resort to flight to escape their bondage. This is a specimen advertisement:
TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD.
RAN away from the subscriber, an Apprentice Boy, named William Rustes, about 18 years and 3 months old, by trade a house carpenter, of a dark complexion, dark eye brows, black eyes and black hair, about 5 feet, 8 inches high, his dress unknown as he took with him different kinds of clothes. The above reward will be paid to any person that will secure him in gaol or return him to his master.
GEORGE LORD,
No. 12 First Street.9
In contradistinction to the scorpion-like laws which worked such injustice to the poor and which made a mockery of doctrines of equality before the law, the propertied interests endowed themselves, by their control of government, with invaluable exemptions and peculiarly profitable special privileges.
Even where, in civil cases, all men, theoretically, had an equal chance in courts of equity, litigation was made so expensive, whether purposely or not, that justice was really a one-sided pastime, in which the rich man could easily wear out the poor contestant. This, however, is not the place for a dissertation on that most remarkable of noteworthy sorcerer's arts, the making of justice an expensive luxury, while still deluding the people