In 1906 South Carolina took a part in the process by agreeing practically to act as the agent of the planters and mill owners of the state, who raised a fund of twenty thousand dollars which, to avoid the Federal statute against the coming in of immigrants under contract to find them work, was turned over to the State authorities. They thereupon made a contract with the North German Lloyd Steamship Company to import several immigrants whose passage was paid out of the fund. In consequence, in November, 1906, appeared in the harbor of Charleston the steamer _Wittekind_, having on board 450 steerage passengers, an arrival which was declared to be the first successful undertaking to promote foreign immigration from Europe to the South Atlantic section of the United States in half a century. These immigrants--137 Belgians, 140 Austrians, and 160 Galicians--were fêted by the Charleston people and triumphantly distributed throughout the State. Part of them were not mill hands at all; others had been misinformed as to the scale of wages and conditions; one of them thought it monstrous that he should have been a week in South Carolina without ever seeing a bottle of beer. They wrote home such accounts of their unhappiness that the steamship company declined to forward any more immigrants, and Mr. Gadsden was sent by the State as a special commissioner to Europe to investigate. He reported in 1907 that the people were writing home to say that they did not like their work or housing. He diagnosed the trouble as follows: "Our efforts have been almost entirely expended in inducing immigrants to come to the South, and we have thought little or nothing of how the immigrant is to be treated after he has come in our midst; ... it seems to me that we have entirely overlooked our industrial conditions, namely, that the wage scale throughout the South is based on negro labor, which means cheap labor ... our attitude throughout the South to the white laborer will have to be materially altered before we can expect to have the immigrant satisfied to remain as a laborer with us." The only considerable groups of foreigners living together in the South are a small German colony in Charleston and a larger one in New Orleans, a body of Germans in central Texas (a settlement dating back to the Civil War), and a few thousand Italian laborers in the lower Mississippi valley who have been brought there chiefly through private agencies in New Orleans and New York. Some Slavs have been introduced into the lower South where they are collectively known as "Bohunks"; and a few efforts have been made to bring in the Chinese.