One of the worst criminal cases of this kind is that of John W. Pace, of Dade City, Ala., who not only shut in his own people, but would seize any black that chanced along that way and compel him to work for him a few days. Judge Thomas G. Jones, who in 1901 was put on the federal bench in that state, made it his business to follow up Pace; when a jury declined to convict him, the judge rated them soundly; another case was made out and Pace thought it prudent to plead guilty, and was sentenced to fifty-five years in the penitentiary. The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the constitutionality of the peonage law and Pace threw up his hands; then, on the request of the judge, the President pardoned him. These and some like convictions have shaken the system of confining men because the employer thinks that otherwise they will go away. Nevertheless, under cover of iniquitous state laws, peonage of Negroes goes on steadily, first by a most unjust enforcement of various special state statutes which require agricultural labor contracts to be made in writing, and to run for a year. The illiterate Negro often does not know what he is signing, and if he did know might see no means of helping himself. It is difficult to contrive a legal penalty for a Negro who simply leaves his contract and goes off; he might be arrested and held for debt, since almost all such hands owe their employer for supplies or money; but all the Southern states have constitutional provisions against imprisonment for debt. The difficulty is ingeniously avoided by most of the states in the Lower South, which make it a punishable offense to draw advances on "false pretenses"; thereby a hand who attempts to leave while in debt to his master can be arrested as a petty criminal. But how is it provable that the Negro might not intend to return and carry out his contract? In Alabama the legislature, with intent to avoid the federal peonage law, has provided that the acceptance of an advance and the subsequent nonperformance of the contract shall be proof presumptive of fraudulent intent _at the time of making the contract_. Now the employer can follow his absconding hand by a process thus described by a planter. You arrest him on the criminal charge of false pretenses, which is equivalent to a charge of stealing the money; you get him convicted; he is fined, and in lieu of money to pay the fine he goes to jail; then you pay the fine and costs and the judge assigns him to you to work out the fine, and you have him back on your plantation, backed up by the authority of the state.