Inasmuch as the raising of cotton requires almost continuous labor, it is customary to make voluntary contracts with both renters and wage hands running for a year, commonly from the first of January; and breach of contract is a special grief and loss to the planter, inasmuch as if a Negro throws up a crop it is often impossible to find anybody else to finish it. Hence has grown up almost unconsciously a practice which closely resembles the Mexican peonage. It is unwritten law among some planters that nobody must give employment for the remainder of the year to a hand who is known to have left his crop on another plantation; and still further, that no contract should be made at the beginning of the year with a family which, after accounting for the previous crop, is still in debt to a neighbor, except that the new employer may pay the old debt and charge it as an advance against the hand. There is nowhere any legal sanction of this widespread practice, but the result is that thousands of Negroes are practically fastened to their plantation because nobody else in the neighborhood will give them employment; and far too many planters therefore make it a point to keep their hands in debt. This system grew up slowly and attracted little attention till it began to be applied to Whites. During the last ten years the South has been opening up sawmills and lumber camps, often far back in the wilderness. In order to get men either from the South or the North, it was necessary to prepay their fare, which was subsequently taken out of their wages. Hence the proprietors of those camps felt that they had a claim on the men's service, and in some cases kept them shut up in stockades. For instance, in 1906, a Hungarian named Trudics went down to Lockhart, Texas, receiving $18.00 for railroad fare, on an agreement to work for $1.50 a day. He did not like the work and thought he had been deceived as to the terms; whereupon he used a freedman's privilege of bolting. He was trailed with bloodhounds by one Gallagher, caught, brutally whipped by the boss, and driven back, as he said, "like a steer at the point of a revolver."