Lumber mills range from a small neighborhood sawmill with a handful of employees to the great organizations which push railroads into the deep woods and strip a mountain side or devastate the lowlands. Such organizations require a great number of laborers, whom they usually feed and to whom they issue from a "commissary" various necessary articles which are charged against the men's wages. As the work is hard, it has not been at all uncommon for employees who had received large advances to decamp. The companies, however, took advantage of various laws similar to those mentioned in the chapter on agriculture to have these deserters arrested and to have them, when convicted, "hired out" to the very company or employer from whom they had fled. Conditions resulting from this practice in some of the States of the Lower South became so scandalous about 1905 that numerous individuals were tried in the courts and were convicted of holding employees in a state of peonage. In 1911 the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional the law of Alabama regarding contract of service. ¹ This law regarded the nonfulfillment of a contract on which an advance had been made as prima facie evidence of intent to defraud and thus gave employers immense power over their employees. Conditions have therefore undoubtedly improved since the peonage trials, but the lumber industry is one in which the labor has apparently everywhere been casual, migratory, and lawless. ¹ Bailey vs. Alabama, 219 U. S., 219. The manufacture of tobacco shows as much diversity of labor conditions as the lumber industry. There are small establishments with little machinery which manufacture plug and smoking tobacco and are open only a few months in the year, as well as those which cover half a dozen city blocks. In the smaller factories the majority of the laborers are black, but in the larger establishments both negroes and whites are employed. Sometimes they do the same sort of work on opposite sides of the same room. In some departments negro and white men work side by side, while in others only whites or only negroes are found. The more complicated machines are usually tended by whites, and the filling and inspection of containers is ordinarily done by white girls, who are also found in large numbers in the cigarette factories. Not many years ago the tobacco industry was supposed to belong to the negro, but with the introduction of machinery he has lost his monopoly, though on account of the expansion of the industry the total number of negroes employed is greater than ever before.