The first reason for the failure of the promising plan is the many undoubted cases, and the more rumored and reported instances, of peonage of white men. In the second place the Italians, who have been chiefly relied upon, have no intention of spending their lives and bringing up their children as plantation laborers; they work so well and are so profitable to both the plantation owners and themselves that after a few years they save money enough to do something that they like better, and that is the end of their service on other people's land. The experience of South Carolina in 1906, detailed in the chapter on Immigration, seems conclusively to prove that most foreigners prefer the North because they think they are better treated there. The fundamental difficulty with the whole plan of immigration is that a great many people in the South believe that the average foreigner is an undesirable member of the community. They have no familiarity with that grinding-down process by which even unpromising races are transformed into Americans. They read of the "Black Hand," which is not very different from some forms of the old Ku Klux Klan; of the Vendetta, which can be paralleled in the Southern mountains; and they show little willingness to receive even the better foreign elements on equal terms. It is a fair question whether if the Italians, for example, should come to have a majority of votes in Louisiana they would ever be permitted to elect and inaugurate a governor out of their own number; whether the phrase "White man's government" does not apply as much against the "Dago" as against the Negro. If the Negroes cannot be replaced, is it not possible to segregate them into districts of their own? For forty years a process has been going on by which the black counties grow blacker and the white counties become whiter; Negroes move into the counties where there is most work and therefore the greatest number of laborers, and the Whites gradually move out of the districts in which the Negroes are very numerous. Could not that process be carried still farther? Some people in despair predict that the Whites will eventually find their way into the West and Northwest, leaving the fruitful South to the Negro. Although there is a steady drift of white people out of the Southern states, it is of the same kind as the movement from New England and the Middle states to the West, and the Whites have not the slightest intention of abandoning their section; buildings go up, mills appear, skyscrapers intensify the city, and in every Southern state the Whites grow richer and more powerful.