In addition to the activities of labor agents and employers, state boards do a good deal to encourage immigration, sometimes keeping within the spirit of the law, and sometimes exceeding it. Another member of this same nefarious family is the peonage system. For a general description of the system the reader is referred to Professor Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_, chapter on Labor. It has been judicially defined in the following words: “Peonage is a status or condition of compulsory service based upon the indebtedness of the peon to the master. The basic fact is indebtedness.”[247] The customary or typical case is where a laborer receives advances of some sort from his employer, and then leaves his service before the terms of his engagement have been fulfilled, certainly before he has repaid his employer for the advances. His employer then procures his arrest, either under a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses, or under the labor statutes of the various states. The employer makes a new agreement with the laborer, that if he will return to his employment, and work out the balance of his indebtedness, the criminal procedure will be dropped. This might seem, on the face of it, a thoroughly just proceeding. The trouble is that the employer has every advantage. The laborer is ignorant, and very often the conditions under which he is to work are grossly misrepresented to him. Lack of forethought, moreover, is one of the chief characteristics of ignorant and unintelligent men. The money or goods advanced to them occupy a very disproportionate place in their minds, compared to the work which they agree to perform in the future. The employer, on the other hand, knows all about the conditions, and just how much he can afford to pay, and is able to give himself the best of the bargain by a broad margin. The Immigration Commission made a thorough investigation of this subject, and found evidences of peonage in every state in the Union, except Oklahoma and Connecticut. In the south, where peonage is supposed to be most rampant, it was discovered that most of the peons were supplied by labor agents in New York City, who seriously misrepresented the conditions under which they were to work, and in many cases sent out men wholly unfitted for the work which they were to do. In the south, however, in spite of the existence of many cases, it appears that the vigorous prosecutions, and the willingness of juries to convict, have pretty well broken up the tendency toward peonage in connection with aliens. In the west and northwest, cases of technical peonage were found in the shoe-shining industry, and in some lumber and railroad camps. But there have been practically no attempts at prosecution for peonage in these states.