ng this contract,
and for the second offense may enter into a contract for additional
service for an extended period, and thus the restraint of his liberty may
be almost interminable.

The law relating to immigrant agents makes it necessary to obtain a
license in each county of the State in which the calling is carried on.
This license is made so high as to be practically prohibitive. Carrying on
the occupation of immigrant agent without a license is a misdemeanor, the
penalty for which is a fine from five hundred to five thousand dollars,
and imprisonment for a period of not exceeding one year. Laws relating to
immigrant agents are found in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina,
and South Carolina.

In addition to these, other laws, perfectly proper on their face, are
perverted to reduce persons to a condition of peonage, among which are
false pretense or false promise laws, absconding debtor laws, board-bill
laws, and in fact every ordinance, regulation, or statute defining a
misdemeanor or crime. It can readily be seen that if the States may by
legislative enactment define any act to be a crime the thirteenth
amendment may become in time a mere nullity.

In a report by Hon. Charles W. Russell, Assistant Attorney General, to the
Attorney General, in 1908, appears this language:

"I have no doubt from my investigations and experiences that the chief
support of peonage is the peculiar system of State laws prevailing in the
South, intended evidently to compel services on the part of the
workingman. From the usual condition of the great mass of laboring men
where these laws are enforced, to peonage is but a step at most. In fact,
it is difficult to draw a distinction between the condition of a man who
remains in service against his will, because the State has passed a
certain law under which he can be arrested and returned to work, and the
condition of a man on a nearby farm who is actually made to stay at work
by arrest and actual threats of force under the same law. The actual
spoken threat of an individual employer who makes his laborer stay at work
against his will by fear of the chain gang, and the threat of the State to
send him to the chain gang whenever his employer chooses to have him
arrested, are the same in result and do not seem to me very different in
any other way."

While the principal sources of the practice of peonage are the laws just
referred to, yet it has existed and does exist without law.