Similar cases have been reported from various parts of the South, involving both native Americans and foreigners; the latter have sometimes had the special advantage of aid from the diplomatic representatives of their country. Inasmuch as some of the state courts were unwilling to take action, cases were brought before the federal courts under the Peonage Act of 1867. Thus, though the personal abuse of Trudics by Gallagher was a state offense which seems to have escaped punishment, the violent laying of hands on him and restraint of his liberty was made a case before a federal court; and Gallagher was sent to prison for three months. It is plain that if foreigners and white Northerners can be practically enslaved, the same thing may happen to white Southerners; this and other like convictions have had a good effect. Quite beyond the injustice of the practice, it has been a damage to the South because it checks a possible current of immigration. In 1908 an attempt was made to show a case of peonage of Italians on the Sunny Side plantation, Arkansas. It proved that one of the hands had grown dissatisfied and started to Greenville to take a train for the wide world, leaving unpaid a debt of about a hundred dollars at the commissary. One of his employers followed him to the station and told him that if he attempted to leave he would arrest him for breach of contract; whereupon the man returned to the plantation. This was certainly not peonage, and the grand jury consequently refused to indict; but it was an attempt to enforce specific performance of a labor contract. Peonage of Whites seems to have about come to an end; it was not stopped, however, by public opinion in the South, and it still goes on through the holding in bondage of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Negroes, either in unabashed defiance of law or through the means of cruelly harsh and unjust laws, aided by bad judges. In the first place, many planters assume that a Negro who is on the debit side on their books has no right to leave the plantation, even for a few days, and as one of them expressed it to me: "If he goes away, I just go and get him." A case recently occurred in Monroe, La., where some colored men were brought from Texas by one Cole on the assurance that they were to be employed in Arkansas. Instead they were switched off and set to work in Louisiana. One of them departed and made his way to Texas, but his master followed him, seized him, brought him back in defiance of all law, and set him at work again. The master was tried for peonage in Texas, but was not convicted.