NORTHERN Mexico is rather a desert, but central Mexico is surely one of the loveliest homes of man this side of Eden. It seems destined by Nature to be loved as passionately as ever any land was loved. Where else in the tropics can whole States know a sun that never burns and a rain that never chills? On this immense plateau, from a mile to a mile and a half above sea-level, the weather is never hot and one garbs oneself as in our Northern States in May or September. One lives summers as fresh and delightful as those of Vermont, but does not have to pay for them with two months of sere autumn and four months of ice and snow. Thanks to the altitude, you have the best features of the climate of the temperate zone, but your year is absolutely expurgated of winter.

If good artists, when they die, go to a paradise all their own, surely they will find it much like Mexico. As you travel, your eye feasts on vast landscapes which reveal to a single glance the rivers, forests, fields, and cities of half a State. Sometimes every window of your car frames a picture you would like forever on the walls of your home. And as the train winds or climbs, each minute offers new pictures to enchant you. Then you mount or descend through distinct climatic zones, each with its own characteristic trees, crops, flowers, fruits, and aspects of human life. What one-altitude land can offer such charms?

Almost always there are mountains somewhere in the scene — blue-black near at hand, pale smoky blue in the distance — an eternal appeal to the fancy to imagine what lies beyond. And mountains mean that at times the traveler is permitted to look down on the whole human scene as might an angel if leaning over the battlements of heaven. They mean, too, that in the early morning and the late afternoon the sunbeams become sculptors, Michelangelos in light and shadow. Then the landscape becomes full of expression, like a face seen in a side-light.

The highway gladdens you with Abrahamic scenes: a shepherd driving his flock, a train of laden donkeys, swarthy women under baskets of fruit, plodding muleteers, creaking oxdrawn carts — Old World pictures our own country from ocean to ocean will never show the like of while we live. You rejoice in convent grounds, cherishing venerable olive-trees, planted before Shakespeare was born, and churches and cloisters mellowed in tone by the weathering and lichens and moss and usage of three centuries.

What Madame Calderon de la Barca wrote eighty years ago is true to-day:

There is not one human being or passing object that is not in itself a picture or which would not form a good subject for the pencil. The Indian women with their plaited hair, and little children slung to their backs; their large straw hats, and petticoats of two colors — the long strings of arrieros with their loaded mules and swarthy wild-looking faces — the chance horseman who passes with his serape of many colors, his high ornamented saddle, Mexican silver stirrups and leathern boots — this is picturesque.

And the riches of Mexico — grain, tobacco, coffee, sugar, chocolate, tropical fruits, cattle and sheep, lumber, precious metals! Nearly two thousand tons of silver extracted a year. Nearly a fifth of a billion barrels of oil. Vast forests of mahogany which would make that wood as cheap with us as any other hardwood if only a railroad were built to carry the timber down to the sea; for the streams will not float mahogany logs. And the overflow from the plateau tumbling down a mile and a half in its short course to the sea — what a series of miniature Niagaras to tap for power! Already the Necaxa power development harnesses, you might say, fifty thousand horses. Then, there is the soil, rich and constantly refertilized with elements leached out of the mountain-sides. There being no winter to paralyze Nature, you get two crops a year. That with farm machinery, storage reservoirs, and scientific agriculture the valleys of central Mexico might become so many gardens, is a truth that scratches at your eyes.

Yet, for all her mildness and beauty and fertility, the sons of Mexico are not glad or hopeful. No doubt there are far more hatreds and feuds and crimes, more baffled souls and frustrate human lives in central Mexico than in Canada, despite its frost-bound half-year. A Mexican friend educated in Boston spoke of his enjoyment of our northern winter. What he enjoyed, I suspect, was the good order, good will and opportunities for all which characterize well governed Massachusetts. Ever and anon as you go about you reflect what a paradise this Mexico might be if it possessed the moral character and the social institutions of the descendants of the Puritans. Nature has done her part. It is man that does not fill out the picture.

MEXICO, with a third of the area of the United States, has but a seventh as many people. Of these fourteen or fifteen millions, about three fifths are Indians of manytribes, breeds, and tongues. In hue, build, and temperament, they differ much among themselves, for the stocks bear the stamp left by centuries of living in localities sharply contrasted in elevation, atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, foods, diseases, and other factors of survival. Two fifths are mestizos of every shade between the races, and whites. Some think the latter range above a million in number while others deem them as few as half a million.

Under Spain the whites, particularly those born in Spain (the peninsulares), were in the saddle; there was never any question of that. After the Spaniards quit the scene in 1823, the mestizos gradually rose and submerged the Creoles or native whites. Although Diaz was mestizo, his era was marked by the domination of the whites and of other Mexicans who would work with them on their terms. White men’s standards and ideals prevailed and foreigners were welcomed. But, lacking a social conscience, Diaz’s cientificos ran exploitation of workers into the ground. They tried to carry more pressure than their system would stand and it blew up. So, since the downfall of Madero in 1913, the process has been one of “Indianization.” Such foreign-born whites as remain have no power; men of tint are on top politically; the Indian element is more selfconscious and aggressive; and the instincts and ideals of the toiling red mass count for more in Mexico to-day than at any time since Cortez and his followers bitted and saddled the Indian and began to ride him.

One result of the political and social upsurge, first of the mestizo and then of the despised Indian, has been the complete disappearance of social divisions based on race. There is no color-Une in Mexico.

2

How are we to appraise a people of this composition?

If the results of the new-fangled intelligencetests, which are having such a vogue since the war, are an index of native ability, we must not expect as much of the Mexican people, even after they have had a fair chance, as we may expect of (say) the Scotch or the Czecho-Slovaks. From examination of first-grade school children in certain public schools of California, Dickson finds that the “intelligence quotient” of the American children of North-European ancestry is 106, while that of the “Spanish” (i. e., Mexican) children is 78, six points below even the Portuguese and the Italians. Young’s testing of the twelve-year-old children in certain California schools shows that only 211/2 per cent of the “Spanish” (i. e., Mexican) children exceed the lowest quarter of the American children in the Alpha test. In the Beta test the percentage is 30. Were they as bright as American children, the percentage would be 75. The percentage of those who beat the lower half of the American children is 15i/^. Were they equal, the percentage would be 50.

The tests of Mexicans in San Antonio and of Indians in United States schools in Oklahoma and New Mexico by Garth of the University of Texas show the following results:

The investigations of Terman of Stanford University point the same way. He declares: “The mental tests for the American Indian indicate that he is not greatly superior to the average negro.” “Our Mexican population, which is largely of Indian extraction, makes little, if any, better showing.” On the other hand, the showing made by the Chinese children tested in San Francisco is as good as that of American children of North-European extraction.

It is a human weakness to rate our own race “superior,” and so I will shun that pitfall by measuring the Mexicans against the Chinese. In the interior of China I traveled for months among a people lacking nearly everything that has come into the life of the West in the last three centuries. Yet they gave such clear signs of cleverness and ingenuity that I felt no temptation to rate them below my own people in mentality. The common folk of Mexico, on the other hand, make no such “hit” with the wayfarer. They seem to have less alertness, less mental “edge” than the bucolic Chinese. I should be surprised if intelligence tests did not reveal among them a larger proportion of subnormals than the Chinese have and a smaller contingent of * * supers. ‘ ‘ More of the Mexicans can read than of the Chinese, yet the Chinese masses contribute to a public opinion, whereas 85 or 90 per cent of the Mexicans do not follow public events and have no opinion at all about them. Candid foreign observers of a philosophic turn confess that they have been struck by the low order of intelligence exhibited in the administration of Mexican States.

There are, to be sure, as fine intellects in Mexico as anywhere else, and they are by no means all of pure white stock. However, such appear to be far fewer proportionately than in a people like the Russians, who have been nearly as sadly handicapped as the Mexicans. This conclusion, that the folk mass below the Rio Grande is not rich in talents, does not cast a slur upon all its members. In rating the individual, of course, we pay no attention to his color or race but consider only his personal performance.

If the red or Indian race is not the intellectual peer of the yellow race or the white race, and if from 75 to 85 per cent of the human germplasm in Mexico is charged with determiners of the traits of the Indian race, then no amount of education and no release of stimulating ozone into the social atmosphere will avail to close quite the gap between Mexico and the onward countries. Such closing could be brought about only if a large and capable immigrating element should contribute a quota of gifted persons who, reinforcing the elite contributed by the present race stocks in Mexico, might provide a high order of leadership in every department of human endeavor. But no such immigration will occur until, beyond all peradventure, order, security, and justice are as assured in Mexico as they are in other countries.

3

In the bigger and stronger peoples there are imperialists eager to tag any weaker people “inferior” as an excuse for bringing it under subjection. Nothing set down here is intended to give these men any comfort. That the Mexican folk produces fewer “superior” and “very superior” individuals than if it were of another race make-up, does not insinuate that sons of the ordinary Mexican, well trained, well read, and keyed up by rivalry and the prospect of “getting on,” may not turn out good workers and good citizens.

There can be no doubt that these people abound in unplumbed possibilities. One proof of this is the creation, on the National Railways of Mexico, of an operative force which, since 1912, has functioned without the assistance of the Americans who taught it. In the years from 1890 to 1912 between fifteen and eighteen thousand Mexicans, mostly unskilled laborers, were put through courses of systematic training lasting from one to three years, to make them skilled machinists, firemen, and locomotive engineers. There can be no question of their having “made good.” I take my hat off to the rank and file on the Mexican trains.

Another proof is the fate of tramway and power stations and of the elaborate mechanical installations at mines and factories when, at various times during the revolutionary disorders, the American superintendents and expert mechanics quit the country precipitately at the call of their Government. The works had to be left in the hands of Mexican under-studies; yet when, a month or two later, the Americans returned, it is said that they regularly found things running as smoothly as ever.

4

We should not think of the Mexican Indian as a Mohawk or a Sioux. He is tiller, not hunter, and is by nature quiet, serious, and peaceful. His servile past makes him dread to face life alone, and so he brings his problems to his employer, looking for sjTnpathy and help. He is as easily led as a child, and the master who understands him and means right generally has no difficulty in managing him. But bad designing men can play upon him and stir him up to atrocities which are quite out of his character.

As a rule he is very loyal to the man he is serving, and his bearing is humble and submissive to a degree that is pathetic. The excesses he may commit when misled and out of hand should not lead one to imagine that he is warlike and bloodthirsty by nature. He is not fond of fighting; what he craves is a chance to gain his bread peacefully in the sweat of his brow.

5

The Mexicans seem to have a racial gift of sensitiveness to beauty. As lovers or makers of good music they rank high. “Mexican band” connotes an artistic and spirited playing of the best music. Their love of color is seen in the buying of flowers by the native passengers at the station, and in the fact that if a laborer has two square yards of soil within the bamboo fence about his hut one of them will be growing flowers. Perhaps the proverbial picturesqueness of the Mexican scene is due to the people’s instinctive avoidance of the ugly in pose, gesture, garb, or decoration.

In the politeness you find at all social levels the Mexicans have a precious asset. The manners of no people are more completely socialized. Of course, courtesy is no substitute for character and good will, but it goes far to promote a frictionless social intercourse. I have no patience with wooden-head Americans who cry “Insincerity!” when the Mexican places himself “at your orders” or assures you “My house is yours.” Shall we call George Washington “insincere” when lie signed his letters “Your obedient servant,” although he was not at all ready to black his correspondent’s boots?

IN the eyes of the sociologist Mexico is a sick society — very sick. I am taking here the point of view of the twentieth century, not of the seventeenth. To Louis XIV or Czar Nicholas I or Metternich or King Bomba of Naples, Mexico would appear to be quite well. But, in the light of the democratic ideas which, spreading out from the American Revolution and the French, have gone resounding and triumphing in the world until democracy bids fair to govern the ideals of humanity, Mexico is prostrated by a complication of diseases from which it is not at all certain she can recover by her own unaided efforts.

1

Mexico’s ignorant or indolent toleration of physical disease is itself a sign of social ill health. Below the Rio Grande human beings are born and die at a rate which characterizes only a primitive society of low vitality. Up to the gray years people die there from two and three quarters to three and one half times as fast as they do in the United States, while the birth-rate is nearly twice ours. Despite the manifold advantages which come to it from being the seat of the National Government and a show place, Mexico City’s mortality is thrice that of American cities of like size. For the most perishing urban population of the world, you would go, not to the steaming cities about the Mediterranean, nor to the half-Oriental capitals of southeastern Europe, nor to the infected ports of tropical South America, but to the metropolis of Christian and civilized Mexico. To find its match you must seek among the worst Asiatic or African cities — Lucknow, say, or Cairo. The Hon. Alberto Pani is Mexico’s minister of foreign affairs. In his monograph, “Hygiene in Mexico,” he declares the capital of his country to be, aside from Chinese cities, for which no vital statistics exist, “assuredly the most unhealthful city in the whole world.” “Each year preventable diseases kill more than eleven thousand five hundred of its inhabitants.”

The infant mortality of the republic is that of the Balkans or Turkey. Half of those bom never see their seventh birthday, while of those born in the registration area of the United States half live for more than forty-two years. To match the longevity — better say brevity — of life in Mexico, which is but fifteen years, one needs to go beyond the confines of our civilization or back into the Middle Ages.

It is not that the Indian race is weak. The breed is the same which four centuries ago furnished the runners who in relays carried fish caught in the late afternoon at Vera Cruz over three hundred miles and up seventy-five hundred feet to Montezuma’s next-day dinnertable in Mexico City. The lower orders simply lack the means or knowledge of living properly. As in China, ignorant mothers feed the nursling adult food — tortillas, bananas, and hot peppers. “Superstition and ignorance,” writes Wallace Thompson, “combine to prescribe loathsome and inefficient cures for temporary ailments, cause the abuse of patent medicines and nostrums, and continuous violation of all the laws of hygiene. Crowded tenements, lack of any fresh air at night, uncleanliness, and all of the unhappy phases of the living conditions of the low-class Mexican have their part in both infantile mortality and the general high death rates.” Pani characterizes the homes of a great majority of the metropolitan population as “sinks of physical and moral infection.”

At first the traveler is bemused by the color, the strangeness, the picturesque and romantic features of Mexico — slow-moving oxen, laden burros winding down mountain trails, dashing horsemen, fountain-cooled patios, shady plazas, beautiful old churches, ancient, everblooming gardens. But presently the veil falls from his eyes and he senses the poverty about him, sees that the masses live in ignorance, discomfort, and anxiety.

Is it that the common Mexican is lazy? No; well fed, well housed, and well clad he makes a fairly good laborer — all employers agree on that. But usually he is under-nourished and under-slept. His food is corn-cakes and beans, with the hottest of peppers to relieve its monotony to the palate. His clothing is two pieces of thin cotton, with, perhaps, rawhide sandals. He folds a light blanket about his shoulders by day and slumbers or shivers under it at night. He sleeps on the dirt floor or on a bit of matting. Bedding or bedstead there is none. No wonder these half fed, half clad creatures, chilled awake in the night and unable for cold to drowse again, talk the heavy hours away. No wonder sleep-famished beings who are at work by daylight curl up in the sun and slumber through the middle of the day.

2

The Mexican of the humbler classes does not react to life as he should, does not grasp at the chances which brush past him. “It is the Indian in him,” say many. “Torpid brain, sluggish imagination.” I doubt it. To a scrutinizer of crania and physiognomy these Indians look promising. I suspect the main root of the peon’s apathy is social. No future beckons him. Above he sees glorious beings lolling on the heights in the sun, free from his limitations and worries, but he finds no ladder by which to climb to them. Ambition, if ever it lived in his heart, has been dead in him since boyhood. He is like a watch without a mainspring because he is without hope. Compare the crowds at the Mexican railway-stations with those at the Texas stations. In Mexico you see a platform thronged with motionless figures which turn upon the animated scene stolid faces and lack-luster eyes. In Texas every human being on the platform acts as if he had something good to look forward to in life. His attitude and countenance express interest, eagerness, or expectancy. The contrast between the two sides of the Rio Grande brilliantly vindicates the worth of our democratic institutions.

The Mexican masses live without an idea of what they are missing. With education how they would thrill to good music ! How hang on drama! But it is their lot to be ox-men; lead gray lives; sit for hosts of empty hours huddled in a serape watching time pass. Melancholy and subdued, uneager, unlit, unstimulated, never gay or bubbling or enthusiastic save as alcohol makes seem to vanish the blank walls of the cell in which they are shut, no wonder they laugh when the rifle’s muzzle is turned upon them and coolly light a cigarette in the face of the firing-squad. Their life is so void that it is not hard for them to let it go.

The stunting of personality in the common Mexican hints barriers and acceptance of inferiority. Not only is getting on almost impossible to one so landless, handicapped, and ill paid, but bitter experience has taught him not to tempt fate by trying to get on. To have more than a little patch of corn and beans, a pig or two, and a brush shelter open on one side containing a metate, or stone on which corn is ground, and a few earthen pots, was to invite trouble. As poor as a Christian hermit of the Thebaid in the fourth century, he might escape the attentions of bandits and patriotas; but a well-to-do Indian, living in a good house, with horses and cattle and burros, assuredly would not. Moreover, the big people rigged the labor market, so that a bare subsistence was all he might hope for. As in Czarist Russia, the employers have paid the worker less than one third of what he would receive in the United States. They have pocketed millions upon millions which in our atmosphere and under our laws would have gone to rear cottages instead of palaces.

3

When one notices that savings-banks have never been provided to encourage thrift among the Mexican poor, whereas you can hardly turn a corner without having lottery-tickets thrust under your nose, another nail is driven in the coffin of the “race” explanation of Mexican poverty. Where would our working-class be if discouragers of savings in the form of state lotteries had been let loose upon the people? When the Mexican finds a spare peso in his pocket he is tempted to spend it for a fraction of a lottery-ticket which may win a prize of half a million pesos. How much manlier to take a chance of gaining Olympus at a bound, than by penny-pinching slowly to build a ladder to home-owning and a bank-account! Among the humble, stories fly about of how a winning number has in a moment lifted this cargador or that arriero from poverty to affluence. Of the myriads who live in Tartarus because the lotteries swallow what they might have saved, no mention is ever made.

Drink has never been the besetting vice of whites in Mexico because the Spaniard is fairly resistant to the lure of intoxicants. He is a survivor of an alcoholic selection which began in South Europe many centuries ago with the domestication of the vine. But the Mexican Indians , like our redskins, have a terrible weakness for fire-water. Before aguardiente from molasses, and tequila and mescal, distilled from the sap of certain species of the centuryplant, they are as iron filings under the magnet.

These maddening beverages must bear the blame for most of the bloody assaults and homicides so frequent among the masses.

The worst scourge is pulque, a kind of hard eider fermented from the juice of the maguey. Here is the secret of the contrast to be noticed between the men of the North, the South, and the coast lands, and the inhabitants of the central plateau, which is the home of the maguey. On this table-land you see tens of thousands of fertile acres which might make food plentiful, dedicated to plantations of this giant centuryplant. Every morning pulque-trains roll into the capital, like our milk-trains only far more numerous. More than ten thousand dollars from the pockets of the poor pass daily over the counters of the vile pulque saloons, of which there are more than two thousand in the capital. It is a blessing that pulque spoils so quickly that it cannot be shipped off the plateau.

The Indian begins the morning with a glass, goes on swigging all day, and gives it to liis children. Here is the key to the proverbial denseness and inefficiency of the laborers of central Mexico. Approach a hut and inquire the way and you will meet the same . glassy stare, thick utterance, and inability to comprehend a simple question which mark the opiumridden provinces of China. Nowhere in Mexico is bread scarcer or milk dearer or the people worse nourished than in the zone of the maguey. The Revolution learned not to recruit in this region for the men were good for nothing as soldiers.

Time and again the revolutionists, who well know what a curse pulque is, have tried to do away with it, but in vain. The big land barons profit too much from their maguey plantations to tolerate any such ^”fool” reforms. Carranza’s Government ordered Sunday closing of the pulque-shops, but the courts found a means of making the law of no effect. The one real snaffle on the business is that you can’t plant maguey any more.

Nevertheless, the prohibition simoon is approaching and it seems to be only a question of time when pulque and spirits, the scourges of the masses, will be outlawed, but not wine and beer, the beverages of the upper classes, which are not greatly abused. The example of the United States has made a deep impression. Already Sonora and Yucatan are dry. Antialcohol leagues are forming. Newspapers are sounding out public men with the query, “Ought Mexico to adopt prohibition?” The wet-dry battle is not far off.

4

With half an eye the sfociologi-st sees that Mexico is narcotized b»y the toxins developed in a conquest society, viz., contempt for manual labor, scorn for the useful and dependence on menial service. When the train stops, importunate porters invade the first-class coach, each hoping to earn a few centavos by carrying a passenger’s bag, for no Mexican gentleman will consent to be seen toting his hand-luggage. The contrast with passengers on our trains, who know nothing of such porters save the few unobtrusive “red-caps” at our great stations, is most instructive. It will be long before Mexicans, with their artificial craving to be waited on, will take to the economical selfserve “automats,” “cafeterias,” and “groceterias” which are spreading among us. Abundance of servants has made most upperclass Mexicans spiritual cripples, morally incapable of looking after themselves.

As in Cuba, the Philippines, and other heirs of Spain, the stigma on labor which soils the hands leads to a crowding of the clean-cuff occupations, with the result that the country is “long” on clerks and “short” on skilled mechanics. The demand for clerical jobs, no matter how ill paid or insecure, loads the government deparments with a horde of needless functionaries. A Carranza minister told me that on taking his portfolio he found in his department 121 employees. He gradually cut the force down to 40 and they gave better service than the 121 had.

Even in the industrial schools, where eager young people are gaining all manner of skill, the penchant for making the ornamental rather than the useful reveals the historic prejudice. The toxins generated in a colony made up of masters and slaves so saturate what may be called the nerve-centers of society, that is, its valuations and ideals, that it may take generations to be rid of them. Something may be hoped from a wholesome emphasis on school training for useful work. Nothing, however, would clear away these soul poisons so quickly as a large immigration of bona-fide American farmers, who, aided by machinery, would do their own work rather than hire it done for them by cheap peons.

5

Mexican society suffers from mascuUmsm. In general the institutions, customs, and moral ideas have been shaped by males and for males. Completely controlling state, church, universities, newspapers, literature, and other normgiving agencies, the men have been able to fix standards of right and wrong, not only for themselves but also for their women-folk. Signs of male ascendancy are everywhere. It appears in the custodial care of daughters; in the halfOriental seclusion of wives; in the exaltation of the wifely virtues of patience, self-effacement, and constancy; in the wide-spread custom of keeping mistresses; in the fact that the spouse’s adultery gives the wronged wife no such claim to divorce as it does the wronged husband; in the exclusion of women from the professions, but not from toilsome and ill paid forms of labor; in the social ostracism of the self-supporting woman; and in the neglect of parents to educate the daughter as they educate the son.

Thanks to thus restricting the influence of women upon customs and ideals, Mexican men generally permit themselves a licentiousness in respect to sex gratification which it would be hard to match anywhere else. Nothing less than dastardly is the way well dressed “mashers” will insult or attack working-girls hurrying home in terror after being detained by their day^s work. A friend of mine saw the secretary of a cabinet officer seize and hug a passing office-girl on the street in the presence of his chief. Those who know insist that the modest young woman unattended on the street at night is far more pursued by filthy words and deeds from men of the upper class in Mexico than she would lye in Spain or Italy.

It is certain that men who can afford it keep a mistress and speak quite frankly of “my other house.” They never dream of fidelity to one woman and would, in fact, be ashamed of such want of virility.

This is why Mexican women who have lived in the States and come to realize the indignity heaped upon the Mexican wife one and all urge their daughters to get American husbands.

There can be no doubt that masculinism has been bad for the character of the males. A philosophical foreign physician in Mexico City has been so impressed with the moral superiority of the Mexican women that he wonders that the two sexes can be of the same race. All American residents express great respect for the character of these women and doubt if there will be much improvement in masculine morals till they have a far larger share in forming public opinion than they have to-day.

6

Remarked to me an American official:

“I never understood political practices here until I spent five years as consul in Spain, Then I saw that the bad politics of Mexico are the fruit of certain traditions which spread from Spain to all her colonies. Even after the colonies threw off Spain’s yoke they remained under the power of these evil Spanish political traditions, the worst in Europe outside of Turkey.”

One of these is that the official governs rather than administers, i.e., makes his personal will prevail rather than the laws of the land. Throughout Spanish America the idea launched by Frederick the Great, that the head of the state is the chief servant of the people, has never taken root. The governor or president still looks upon himself as master.

Another noxious tradition is that office affords an opportunity for legitimate income “on the side.” He who’ foregoes this opportunity is looked upon not as a patriot but as a fool. Hence, “graft,” the selling of justice, the forcing those who may be benefitted by your official action to divide secretly with you, are nearly universal practices in Spain and they prevail generally throughout the former colonies of Spain.

Here is the root of the chronic revolutionism of Mexico and tropical South America. These revolutions are mainly due not to impatience or to love of fighting but to the experience of gross misgovernment. The causal series is: misgovernment, discontent, revolution; misgovernment, discontent, revolution — not a circle, however, but a spiral, for in each revolution certain evil practices of governors have been singled out, stressed, made known to all, put under the ban. So that the revolutionists in power are not likely to commit all the abuses of which their predecessors were guilty. Still, the progress in government is very slow. The people rise against a misgovernor, but do not forsee that the fair promiser who leads them will misgovern nearly as badly, once he gets into power, because the minds of him and his followers are dominated by old Spanish political traditions.

APPROACHING the matter with an open mind, I arrive after diligent questioning at the following estimate of the Diaz regime, 1884-1911, under which accumulated the discontent which brought on revolution.

General Diaz was really a great man and had the good of Mexico at heart. He was not bent on self-enrichment and he quit Mexico with only a very modest fortune. Recognizing that of the first sixty years of national independence one half had been spent in Mexicans fighting Mexicans, he made the achievement of political stability his first concern. Sternly he put down banditism until you could travel with safety in any part of the republic. He put fear into the hearts of the local chieftains, who had been wont, on occasion, to head a rising against the regular government. When he heard that a political personage was plotting trouble he sent him word to come to Mexico City for a talk. In this talk the President put the situation up to him as man to man and gave him the option of establishing his family in the capital or accepting a mission abroad. If he refused and went home, the rurales were informed, and presently he met a violent death, always accidental or mysterious. There can be no doubt that this iron grasp was necessary, for almost never were these trouble-makers vindicating a wholesome principle; they were moved by nothing nobler than resentment, ambition, or greed.

About 1890, having quieted the country, Diaz instituted his series of wonderful public works : fifteen thousand miles of railroad, the railway across the isthmus of Tehuantepec, a net of telegraphs, and seven seaports, created or improved. Moreover, he reformed the currency, set the finances on a solid basis, raised high the national credit, and made Mexico an attractive field for the investment of foreign capital.

Nor was he intent solely on material progress. Observing how the Indians were besotted and embruted by spirits, he put a stiff tax on them, under pretext of needing revenue but really in order to restrict their use. Alcoholic drinks had been sold everywhere. He required them to be sold in licensed shops which could not exceed a certain proportion to the population. He required such shops to be without tables and chairs in order to discourage drinking on the premises. As the Indians would sit or lie about the floor, under pretext of sanitation he required such shops to have a stone or cement floor uncovered. In order to make up to the Indians for these deprivations, he promoted the formation of to^vn bands, of theatrical and operatic troupes. About 1895 he began a war on illiteracy by planting public schools, and in ten years a large part of the rising generation knew how to read and write. General Diaz scoffed at people-rule and pinned his faith to autocracy. He was a patriot with a patriarchal ideal. In order to carry out his great public-works program, he gathered about him a group of very able men — the cientificos. In ability and breadth of view they were very much superior to Mexico ‘s public men of to-day, but they were actuated by motives of greed and self-aggrandizement and had not a particle of idealism. In time, as under the burden of advancing years the President’s grip relaxed, they formed a combination and kept him from knowing what was going on or what the people were thinking. So these coadjutors used him for their own purposes, rather than he them for the advancement of Mexico.

If only Diaz had retired in 1906 ! Surrou nded by sycophants who wished him to retain power so long as th^ey could manage him, the President behaved more and more like a monarch and showed an intense jealousy of any one who aspired to succeed him in the Presidency. In 1910, at the age of eighty, he actually had himself ** elected” for another four years and with him as Vice-President he associated the sinister Eamon Corral.

Furthermore, as Diaz, enveloped by cientificos, lost touch with public opinion, more and more he imposed on the States governors so wdcked that their misdeeds provoked the spirit of resistance. These bad governors were wont to cloak their shameful deeds with the excuse that they were acting under orders from the Central Government. Thus upon the Diaz administration fell the odium of the crimes committed by these men.

Under Diaz often the greatest landowner in the State became governor. Thus Terrazas, father and son, constituted a dynasty in the State of Chihuahua. Under such a governor the great properties were grossly undervalued for taxation while the petty landholders paid the taxes dodged by the hacendados. Thanks to this differential in the pressure of taxation the big fellows were able to buy in cheaply the adjacent small properties, so that the great haciendas were swallowing up everything.

There is no clearer indication of the spirit of the Diaz regime than the enormous and splendid unfinished National Theater which occupies the most eligible site in the capital. Its stage, on which a regiment might stand without crowding, is equipped with the most perfect mechanisms ever devised for the production of theatrical illusions. The great curtain, in Tiffany’s stained glass, is the only one of its kind. The sunken orchestra is the last work in theater planning. But what are we to think of a Government which erected such a temple of pleasure while Mexico was famishing for schools? Not one in five hundred of the people whose money went into this palace of spectacles would ever see the inside of it. It was reared at the expense of the Mexican people for the few thousand well-to-do who resided in the capital. While its walls were rising Diaz was denying the minister of education the money he asked for the planting of schools and seminaries for the training of teachers with the words, “Not yet; we haven’t the money. Be content to go slower.”

Where, in real democracies, such as the American states or Britain’s self-governing colonies, do you find millions going into a national theater? Yet their citizens can at least read and write, while not a fourth of Diaz’s Mexicans were literate.

2

Under Diaz in his last phase not only were the elections a sham but there was no freedom of public meeting, of speech, or of the press, no freedom of labor to organize or to agitate; the people were in the power of governors appointed by Diaz and of jefes politicos appointed by the governor; and a system of shanghaiing poor and friendless men for the great plantations struck terror into the hearts of the humble.

The Revolution has swept away these enormities. The governors of the States are chosen by tlie people. The jefeturas have been abolished, and the municipalities have been extended until they completely cover the country so that there is no rural area between them. This new machinery of peace-officers is not working well yet, but it ought soon to do better.

Debt lien has been abolished and all debts from peons to their employers wiped out. The peon is free to come and go at will. The delinquent debtor does not forfeit his liberty, and, as with us, all unsecured loans are on a personal-confidence basis. Communities despoiled of their ancient common lands are getting them back, and any village may be fitted out with an ejido from the adjacent haciendas, so that the inhabitants will not be wholly dependent on the petty wages the neighboring landholder may offer them for their labor. Now that their owners no longer carry the Government in their waistcoat pockets, the great estates are overvalued and overtaxed as once they were under valued and undertaxed. In time this differential tax pressure will force division of those which do not demand to be handled as a unit. Inevitably the superior peon will gain a stake in the land and therewith become a law-andorder man.

Speech and press are free, but there is the sharpest difference of opinion as to freedom of elections. Men of property insist that there has been only one free election in Mexico in fifty years, viz. that of 1911 in which Madero was elected. Everybody (they say) knows that the votes will not be honestly counted, and so fewer and fewer take the trouble to vote. It is true that the anti-Revolutionary element shun the polls, but there is another explanation of their abstinence. In the coastal and northern States the church is much weaker than in the central region. Where, in these States, the Catholics are weak, they put up no electoral fight for they feel themselves beaten before the balloting takes place. Feeling themselves hopelessly outnumbered, the conservative and propertied class likewise put up no candidates and cast no vote. On the other hand, the workers, in so far as they are not controlled politically by the clergy, vote, and believe that their votes are counted. Between the Agrarian, Labor, Cooperatist, and Constitutional parties — all of them pro-E evolution and differing more in leaders than in principles — there is a very lively electoral struggle. “Why should such candidates electioneer so energetically for the control of Government or Congress if the votes are not counted? It is significant that in the last elections in Vera Cruz City there was no violence or intimidation at the polls and the party that won was not the party which dominated the city government and therefore the police. This election, at least, was no farce.

3

Since he came to the helm, President Obregon, although a rough fighting man, has showm himself most conciliatory. Like General Grant, his maxim is **Let us have peace.” He leans on no single class but is trying to forestall further upheaval by satisfying the legitimate aspirations of the proletarian element. He is not a well educated man, but earnestly he seeks enlightenment. On his study table I saw nothing but serious books on Mexico’s problems by her leading thinkers. The reading of Dr. Gamio’s book, “Forging a Nation,” led him to adopt a different policy toward the Yaqui Indians. Instead of setting over them Mexicans, who would try to suppress their tribal dances and festivals, he let them choose head-men for themselves. As a result they are now prosperous and contented.

Obregon found a way to placate Villa. As for the Zapatistas to the south, instead of continuing to fight them, he left them to run the State of Morelos in their own way. Now “Zapata-land” is tranquil and hard at work. He ceased interference with working-class ascendancy in Yucatan, which was based upon organization and votes. He accepts loyally the labor charter embodied in the constitution, and organized labor supports his Government.

While a sincere purpose animates many of the leading members of the Government, they are not equal in education, experience, and knowledge of economics and government to the “Diaz group.” Some of the men in power possess real ability, but they lack training. Probably not a single one of them has studied socialism closely enough to understand what it implies or realizes the actual outcome of the Russian experiment. They are learning by doing, but the country suffers from their mistakes.

Such socialistic sentiment as exists has not sprung up out of the people’s experience but has been propagated partly by sincere enthusiasts, partly by popularity-seeking politicians.

Since Mexico is an undeveloped country in need of a continuous inflow of foreign capital, the flirting with policies which alarm foreign capitalists is economically suicidal. The political masters of Mexico do not realize this as they would if they were well grounded in political economy.

The national operation of the Mexican railways has been a financial failure, for they have been running behind a million pesos a month.[1]Only lately a new director-general has been appointed who announced a saving of $150,000 during the first month of his incumbency. This official with $1000 a month has superseded the old concejo directivo, composed of three men each drawing $1000 a month. Thirty civil engineers at $4500 a year each, and one hundred and ftfty secret railroad police at $2700 a year each have been discharged. The railroad shop crafts have submitted a program of economies which, they figure, might save $32,500,000 a year. No wonder, when they were committed to a concejo directivo of three men, two of them without ability or education and without the technical knowledge and experience for managing railways. During the Revolution the rates were raised horizontally 50 per cent. The concejo raised them again 25 per cent, although the technical men warned them that receipts would decline. They did so, and lately the last advance has been taken off. One of the worst abused institutions has been and is the telegraph service. Innumerable “official messages” (which go free) are sent by each and every official on each and every matter, official or personal,

De la Huerta, the secretary of the treasury, is regarded as an honest man, but not equipped for his responsibilities. It is said that he was bookkeeper of a bank in Sonora till the Eevolution opened for him a way up. General Calles, secretary of the interior, is a rough, forceful man with much natural ability but with halfbaked economic ideas. Only Vasconcelos, secretary of education, and Pani, secretary of foreign affairs, are university-bred men. Thus the men about Obregon do not measure up to the Diaz standard, and in certain respects the country is not so well served.

Men who worked with Carranza contend that the country would be quite as well run with half the present outlay. Some foreign observers regard this as the best Government Mexico has ever had, but all agree that the waste is appalling. Under Diaz many places were created for persons in a position to make trouble. The Revolutionaries inherit this evil custom. The heads of departments and bureaus do not understand how to organize their forces, appointing a definite task for each man to do and seeing that he does it. The chief does not know what his subordinates are doing with their time. If he would attend to the humble details of what each clerk or janitor is doing, he would discover the waste.

In July, 1922, when the Treasury’s oil receipts were falling off and the pay-checks of civil servants were held up or cut, the Government sent a large mission to Rio de Janeiro to help celebrate the centennial of Brazilian independence. It included, besides the diplomatic representatives, a forty-piece orchestra, an eighty-piece band, one hundred naval cadets, and three hundred military cadets. It was estimated that the mission would cost three million pesos, i.e., a million and a half dollars. The Government buys four thousand American farm-wagons to sell to farmers at cost. But, since such wagons are not suited to Mexican roads and draft-animals, it is inferred that the purchase was made because there is a ^ ‘ rake-otf ” in it for somebody. Taxes appear to be imposed on the simple principle of going after wealth when you catch sight of it. In one of the border States a planter had arranged to grow cantaloupes and send them to the American market. But when a special tax was imposed which would take half of what the grower might receive, he abandoned the project.

The President tries hard to make his officials honest. Crooked collectors of customs on the northern border have been sternly dealt with. A group of Americans established a model playground in the capital, and, after it had been running successfully some months, it was turned over to the municipality. Within mi hour every one of the trained and efficient members of the staff had been discharged and their places given to political friends of the mayor, who cared nothing about recreation but wanted the salary. The founders complained to the President, who made the mayor turn it back, and it is now in charge of the Playground Association of America.

Take the state government of Puebla. Says a representative business man in Puebla: “None of the officials here are highly educated or intelligent. I don’t know that they graft — but the public money melts away and the people get very little for it. Before the Revolution the State spent a million a year. Now it spends three millions, but there are few visible benefits and the State can’t even pay its school teachers. The men now on top are ruthless, unscrupulous, and violent. The professional and business men have no confidence in them.” Of these men an American official said, “Most of them are so sympathetic with labor that they do not understand the necessary rights in which the capitalist must be secured.” A newspaper man observes, “The governor is honest but the men he has to use are not honest and hence the public revenues are largely grafted.” From meeting and talking with seven state governors I formed an impression that they were good men, but that they have to work with rather dubious subordinates.

4

Will there be another revolution?

In Guadalajara, a Conservative stronghold, I heard of a movement among the “better element.” Explained my informant:

“The hacendados are becoming bolder, and more ready to take their own part. The idea would be for each hacendado to arm and hold ready for the signal a squad of his peons who have shown themselves loyal through all these years of ferment. Then, when all was ready, these little bands would come together at appointed places and under designated leaders would proceed to seize control of matters in an assigned region. Once such a government was set up, the constitution of 1917 would be torn up, a new constitution gi\^ing proper protection to property and vested interests would be promulgated, American recognition would be forthcoming at once and the investment of foreign capital would begin again.”

Others point out that small uprisings are bombilating on the horizon all the time and that three quarters of the problems of the present Government come from them. The army saves it, but what if the army should turn against it? If the generals do not get their pay regularly they may make trouble, and the Government is confronted by growing financial difficulties. Again, after a season of being cooped up in barracks, the soldiers yearn for the oldtime roaming, looting, and raping, and they may turn against their present chiefs.

On the other hand, all the practical politicians say:

“The fighting is over. The people regard the present Government as theirs, and no popular movement against it can be stirred up. Reforms are being carried into effect, the peon is athrill with hope, and the masses feel that a way upward is now open. The propertied class dares not start anything. The rising of small groups headed by men with a personal grievance or an ambition will occur from time to time, for this disease is chronic in Mexico, but such risings have no revolutionary significance.”

I believe this view is sound. Overturn can come from nowhere but from the propertied, and very few of the aggrieved landowners will come to the point of risking their skins in a revolutionary attempt. After all, life may be sweet even if your estate is cut down to a paltry ten thousand acres!

Shrewd, too, is the point made by one of our consuls:

“Revolution is not likely to recur because, since the cattle have been eaten up and the country has been stripped of easy loot, there is nothing in it for the peon. The less the country offers to rebels, the more money is required to finance a successful uprising; so that the cost of overthrowing the Government is becoming prohibitive. This is why the refugee leaders in the States are beooming more and more despondent.”

Says a wise man who held a high post under Carranza:

“The present Government shows little brains and foresight, but no good could come of overthrowing it. The right policy is by pressure to oblige it to take in more competent men. The spread of economic paralysis will oblige the Government to call a convention to re\dse the constitution of 1917 by making property rights more secure. It is significant that a party has been formed which advocates revising the constitution in a conservative spirit and that the head of this party was chairman of the Queretaro convention which adopted the constitution.”

The Mexican “Whites” cackle “Bolshevism,” but what confronts us in Mexico is not dictatorship of the proletariat but our old disreputable friend Democracy. We Americans know pretty well what this must mean in a people so backward. We have seen negro domination in the South during the Reconstruction era. We have seen New York under Tammany and our chief cities misgoverned by political rings.

In Mexico anything like real popular government is bound to result in waste, graft, blunders, and follies.

Nevertheless, the enlightened element there will probably have to put up with these drawbacks of people-rule. The world over the tide now runs strong against czarism, kaiserism, Diaz-potism, and like foes of democracy. Besides, the people learn. New York City has won through not by depriving the people of power but by educating them. Day by day the minds of the simple Mexicans are clearing. Bolshevist ideas meet with even less response than they did a few years ago. In their unions the workers are gaining some sound civic ideas. The church is a powerful counterpoise to the demagoguery of self-seeking politicians. The men now on top are committed to a policy of universal public education; and, given time enough, education of the right sort can heal a sick society. So there is a chance that Mexico may be made whole by her own recuperative forces.

IN his Luxurious home in the City of Mexico, Don Rafael, once lord of a hundred thousand acres in the State of Morelos just over the mountains to the south, told me his troubles. “Only last February,” he said, “I was permitted to lay before President Obregon my project for building up my sugar estate, devastated by the Zapatistas, with foreign capital which I am able to borrow, and then selling it off in small lots to such peons as have enough money for a first payment. He expressed sympathy with my plan, and I felt myself safe. Yet now comes a notification from the National Agrarian Commission that eight thousand more acres of my land will be taken to provide the villages with commons.”

Don Rafael was sure that most of the twelve thousand souls on his haciendas do not want to own land themselves. “What they want is employment — day’s wages.” In velvety phrases he pictured how happy and contented his peons had been in the good old Diaz days, each with house plot and garden furnished rent-free by the kind hacendado, and free pasturage for his live stock up to two hundred head. The peon was paid punctually every Saturday, but even as early as Wednesday he could get an advance. “In the whole world,” he said, “I doubt if there existed a happier workingpeople than those on the plantations of Morelos.”

“If they were so well off and contented,” I ventured, “why did they all go out with the Zapata brothers?”

He floundered a moment, then righted himself. “They came under bad influences. Foreign ideas were preached to them. Lenin had missionaries here from the first. The fact is, Obregon and several members of his cabinet are Bolshevists. It is the propaganda from Russia that made our trouble.”

“But,” I demurred, “Zapata’s Plan of Ayala, which your peons unanimously rallied to, was put out in 1913, four years before Russian Bolshevism was ever heard of. How, then, can it be that your peons demanded land because they were put up to it by Lenin’s agents?”

At this point, seeing that I knew more than he had supposed, Don Rafael began telling me that men of wealth would never be secure again in Mexico until the church had entire charge of education. She teaches the masses to keep their proper place.

A few days later I was looking over the devastated haciendas of Morelos, which is more than their owners venture on. Probably not one of them has laid eyes on his estate for years. I was shown about by two ex-Zapatistas who did not look the part. One was the director of education, a slim, handsome young man with a smile like a June morning. Before the Revolution he was an ill paid schoolmaster. The other was a noble-looking young engineer, who has charge of surveying and plotting the land to be assigned to the villages as commons. He was a student once in Columbia University. These men gave me a vivid idea of what the ten years’ struggle for the land has meant to the people.

Under Diaz all the arable land of this lovely mountain-girt State was owned by thirty-two great proprietors, nearly all Spaniards, who lived in Mexico City when they did not live abroad. Bound to the hacienda by debt, the peons had to accept such terms as the amo, or master, dictated. For working from sun to sun, they were rewarded with twelve cents and a measure of corn, while the master drew fabulous profits from their under-paid toil on his land. Protection for them, there was none. The justices were all amos or their representatives, and the state government was the handmaid rather than the mistress of these sugar kings. The officials and the legislature might work out a budget of, say, three hundred thousand dollars for public needs for the comingyear; but the Association of Hacendados would declare such a burden “intolerable” and send word that they would furnish only two hundred thousand dollars. Then the government had to make out with this sum.

Nor did the church stand up for these poor bondmen. Not only were her dignitaries hand in glove with the great planters, but some of them were members of these same families. The peons were in the leading-strings of priests, who confirmed them in their ignorance and submissiveness and filled their minds with the most absurd ideas as to religion and the respect due the master.

Popular education was in the doldrums. There were only seventy public schools in Morelos, i. e., one to twenty-five hundred inhabitants. Even now, with population one third less, thre« hundred schools are found necessary. In villages of some importance the pay of the schoolmaster did not exceed fifteen dollars a month, while there were teachers who received but five dollars a month. While the laborers lived in kennels and the teachers in huts, in the capital only fifty miles away sixty millions of pesos were being lavished on a “Teatro Nacional,” a Palace of Congress, and on splendid parks and monuments intended to dazzle diplomats and foreigners.

The administrador of the hacienda was usually a Spaniard, who not long before had come to Mexico with the conquistador idea that the Indians are born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. He treated the peons as domestic animals — no, not that, for the sick or injured burro was cared for better than the sick or injured peon ! The burro was property. As in feudal times, the jus primae noctis was asserted. Before her marriage the comely daughter of the peon passed through the hands of the hacendado, or of his administrador.

The villages were no longer secure in the time-hallowed common lands granted them two or three centuries ago in patents signed by the king of Spain. There was pointed out to me a village up in the hills which had owned a block of fine forest. The owner of a big neighboring estate had set up a sawmill and, lacking timber enough of his own to keep it busy, made the villagers an offer for their woods. They refused it, for the Indians hang on to these ancient grants with a death grip. But the governor, a native of that same village, who had become a hunting comrade of President Diaz, brought pressure to bear and, after trying in vain to obtain legal protection of their rights, the village head-men felt constrained to accept the paltry sum offered them. Every one now supposed the matter closed, but, some time afterward, the governor sent word that he wished to see the twelve head-men about some business of the village. They came, and the matter was discussed and disposed of. Then they were all arrested and sent to the infamous Valle Nacional, that natural prison where enticed or kidnapped men slaved their lives away on the coffee-plantation. They were never heard of again.

Led by the Zapata brothers, the peons of Morelos helped break the Diaz yoke and seat Madero. When Madero’s Government disappointed them, these insurgent peasants, with never a peso of pay, who turned from plow to gun and from gun to plow, tried to conquer Mexico for their ‘4and-to-the-peon’^ program. At one time *’Zapata-land” included Guerrero and Oaxaca, as well as parts of Mexico, Puebla, Michoacan, and Tlascala. In other States, where land was not so monopolized nor the conditions so bad, the resistance to their program was stronger. For a while they occupied Mexico City, and citizens there have told me how these armed “bandits,” wearing religious emblems on hat and shoulder, would come to the back door and ask respectfully, almost humbly, for food. Nevertheless, one hears blood-curdling tales of fell deeds committed in Morelos by some bands of Zapatistas.

First Huerta fought the Zapatistas, then Carranza. Villa was in full sympathy with their land ideals, but not Carranza, himself a hacendado. Year after year Federal troops came in, razed their houses, ravaged their growing crops, and seized their stores of grain. “With their women and children they lived in the hills, these peasants, in caves, or under boughs or zinc-roofing ripped from the cane-mills. Their indomitable spirit is expressed in the sentiment which “rebels of the south” have penciled on a pillar of the Bordo Garden at Cuernavaca. Es mas honroso morir de pie que vivir de rodillas. (Better die standing than live kneeling.)

In 1916, held in the hills by Federals, they could not plant, so that the next year many perished of hunger. From 1917 to 1919 they had a breathing-space. Then Pablo Gonzales was sent in with forty thousand men, and again they had to skulk like foxes while their homes and fields were laid waste. Only since Carranza fell in 1920 have they been left in peace. Realizing the futility of fighting longer with them, Obregon made them promises which so far he has kept. They did not win the republic for their program, but Morelos is theirs.

In these terrible struggles, from forty to fifty thousand of the population perished, while the country was wrecked. The soldiers smashed the houses in the villages, while the haciendas suffered from both parties. The Zapatistas burned cane-fields and hacienda buildings in order to destroy the magnet which brought in expedition after expedition. The Federals dismantled the cane-mills in order to sell the copper and machinery in the capital.

As I went about these haciendas, I could form an idea of the place of the peons in the old scheme of things. The house-lots on which they were allowed to build their adobe huts occupied from a seventh to a tenth of an acre of the stoniest ground to be found anywhere near the quadrangle of hacienda buildings. By putting up their houses on the master’s land the peon acquired no rights. I saw how in one case the master had found it convenient, in connecting his cane-mill with the railway, to lay a spurtrack right through the settlement of the peons. Their huts and stone walls were ruthlessly torn down, and the evicted had to rebuild on a lava outcrop nearby. Here, where no well was possible, the only drinking-water for 114 families was from the irrigation-ditch. The master had piped spring-water into his buildings, but none of it was available for them. Now the route of the piping has been changed so as to carry it past the village, and a faucet has been put in for their use.

The Laws of the Indies drawn up by the royal council in Spain for the proper governance of his Catholic Majesty’s dominions in the New World were very careful to secure to the Indians an opportunity for subsistence. About each village wdth a church was a square, twelve hundred yards each way, known as the fondo legal. Inclosing this was a block, a little less than a league in extent, known as the ejido, or common, on which they might graze their animals and grow their food. About this was a neutral zone, and then came the great haciendas. Each village had its parchment signed by the king of Spain, confirming it in its ejido, which was never to be sold, taken, or given away. In some cases the lands of the village were defined in documents of Aztec picture-writing on fiber.

The encroachments of the powerful on these ejidos in colonial times was one reason for the enthusiastic support the Indians gave Father Hidalgo’s cry for independence in 1810. But it was chiefly under Diaz that they w^ere lost. The law of 1856 frowned upon communal land holding. The arable common had to be distributed to the members of the village, and then it was not long before the holders were forced or tricked into alienating them. In a few forceful strokes the Agrarian Law sets forth the result.

The Indian villages having been deprived of the lands, waters and mountains granted them by the Colonial Government, while in the rest of the country the rural property had become concentrated in a few hands, the great mass of the rural population had no other recourse for procuring themselves the means of subsistence than to sell their labor for a pittance to the powerful landholders: the inevitable result being the state of misery, objection and de facto slavery in which the enormous mass of laborers has lived and still lives.

When, two years ago, the state government set about restoring the ejidos, it called upon the villages to send into Cuemavaca, the capital, their royal patents so that they might be copied. The Indians so cherished these yellowed documents conveying title to common lands of which they had been robbed that they would not trust them out of their sight a moment. A delegation would bring in the patent and sit patiently on their heels all day watching the copyists turn it into modern Spanish. At nightfall they would take it with them and reappear with it next morning. “Well did the Indians realize that the possession of land for growing their food made to them just the difference between freedom and dependence.

The new order here pirovides each village with its ejido. For each head of family and male over eighteen years there should be four acres of irrigable land, or three times as much non-irrigable plowland, or a still larger amount of pasture. In order to administer this new common property, the village has to organize a municipality. Besides the mayor, there is an executive committee to divide the common into plots of the right number and size, and to arrange for their apportionment by the drawing of lots. Then, there is an administrative committee to arrange for the best use of the implements and oxen owned in the village, to give the greenhorns the benefit of the judgment of the wiser cultivators, and to decide what shall be done -with neglected plots. Since the diligent peons are now able to feed their families from the plots assigned them, they no longer have to work for the hacendado or starve. The latter still has the larger part of his estate — probably two thirds of it in the average case — but he lets it lie rather than pay the wages the peon demands. He offers thirty-seven cents a day, but Juan asks twice that much. However, the land is not idle, for squatters have gone to tilling it; moreover, the loan bank, which was established under Diaz to promote agriculture but which in reality lent government money to the sugar kings without interest, is foreclosing its mortgages, dividing the land into plots and leasing them without rent for six years to persons who will till them.

The hacendados insist that the peon is lazy — useless save as a hired laborer. Give him land and he will neglect it. So I put it up to these officials: “Have you no fear lest these lands you are cutting off from the estates and handing over to the villages will be cultivated poorly or not at all?”

They smiled. “Not in the least. Haven’t we seen these peons plowing and sowing on their own account for eleven years — no master to offer them wages, no mounted capatas to drive them to work I In Morelos the peon is not in the least an unknown quantity as an independent farmer.

In faith, there is some reason for their confidence. In the summer of 1920 the people were in rage — no homes, no implements, no oxen. Often with their own strength they pulled the plow through the soil. Since then they have raised three crops, two a year in this paradise, and out of the exported surplus they have been providing themselves with implements, draftanimals, and clothes. Not a tattered garment did I espy. In every field oxen are to be seen, and everybody is at work. A returned peon piles loose stones to form a kennel, which he plasters with adobe and roofs with corn-stalks. He burns limestone and carries the product on his back over twenty miles of lava trail to Cuernavaca. He converts his lime into fowls, lime and eggs into pigs, these three into burros, oxen, last of all, clothes. This is the story of thousands — getting on by hard work. In such a climate and with such a soil the hustler gets ahead rapidly when he is not exploited.

“Yes, they are growing corn and beans and rice for themselves,” growl the hacendados, “but nothing for Mexico. Morelos used to be Mexico ‘s sugar-bowl, sending out fifty thousand tons of refined sugar a year. Petty cultivation there means that we shall have to import sugar or go short.” It is not so sure, however, that the cane is doomed in Morelos. In one district seventy-five hundred acres are in cane, which will yield seed to plant ten times that area next year. A big Hawaiian company is negotiating with the Government to build mills to grind the cane the peasants will grow. The Government will let the growers acquire stock on easy terms, so that they will share in the profits of sugarmaking. There is a fighting chance, then, that these fiercest of Mexico ‘s revolutionists will recover prosperity without putting their heads again into the lion’s mouth.

IN the semi-arid north you will find land holdings fifty miles across, the shortest way — a million, even two million, acres. In Jalisco, however, land is better divided than in most parts of Mexico. Probably no hacienda comprises more than two hundred square miles. Among the rural grandees of this State Don Manuel is by no means a whale. Yet his estate has twice the extent of the Italian republic of San Marino!

Visit San Gabriel and you might think yourself on one of the latifundia of Roman Africa in the time of the Emperor Augustus. Of modern democracy not a trace. Don Manuel is young and contemporary, a product of the oldest of English schools and an Oxford graduate — but he has to play the patriarch with his people. If matters are criss-cross between husband and wife, he is expected to straighten things out. If a son is incorrigible, Don Manuel gives the scamp a serious talking-to. If a peon gets drunk and beats his family, they bring the matter to Don Manuel. It is he who builds the church and pays the priest. He provides what passes for schools, as well as medicines, and in dire cases a doctor. He puts up houses for his folk, and three fourths of his three hundred cabins huddle near the huge mansion about the flagged patio where the amo lives when he is not in his town house in Guadalajara. The rest are on outlying ranchos. Half a regiment of men work on the hacienda, and its population can hardly be less than two thousand souls.

Corn is grown on shares. The amo, who furnishes seed, implements, oxen, and supplies for the peon’s family, gets half. Eare is the peon who saves his half and prospers. When Juan has sold his sacks of corn he pays for the seed and supplies which have been advanced to him, buys new clothes, and goes on a spree. Soon his pockets are empty and he calls upon his amo to let him have provisions on credit.

Wheat — the same is true of cane, barley, and chick peas — requires machinery and is, moreover, a money-maker, and so the amo grows it with hired labor. For this he pays twenty-two cents a day plus five quarts of corn and a weekly three and one half quarts of beans. Then, there is free pasturage for the peon’s live stock. Here and there a share tenant gets to the point of having peons working for him. One who has undertaken one hundred and fifty acres hires the men to keep sixteen yokes of oxen moving; another has taken forty yokes.

Don Manuel owns twelve hundred yokes of oxen, but a third of them are not working on the place this season. He asserts that his tenants are planting less than usual from fear lest the land bearing their crop be handed over to some village by the Agrarian Commission. So far nothing has happened, but the fitting out of the one village within his hacienda with a common (ejido) would take about seventeen hundred acres of plowland, besides rough pasture.

On the Mexican plateau the splitting up of the latifundia is in some degree hampered by the necessity of storing the run-off of the rainy season to succor the crops in the dry season. Across certain swales on Don Manuel’s property have been built dams creating three large reservoirs and two small ones. A big one is planned which would complete the irrigation of the plowland. It will cost one hundred thousand dollars, besides drowning a fine field.

This multiplication of reservoirs saves many a crop but requires capital. In the interests of Mexican agriculture, thousands of such dams should be built and thousands of fields become reservoirs. Who will do this? The state? But the state lacks the capital and practical judgment the job calls for. Cooperative credit associations of the Raffeisen type? Most of the peons are no more ready for cooperation than Egyptian fellaheen. Their sons? Perhaps, but the education for it has not yet reached them. So water storage is a serious obstacle to the speedy conversion of the latifundia into one-family farms

Governor Nieto of San Luis Potosi, one of the leaders in the chopping of the haciendas into small farms, admits that the proper development of agriculture in the dry part of his State calls for hundreds of reservoirs for water storage and many leagues of distributingditches, and that this greatly adds to the difficulties of creating homesteads.

The peon cabins as usual are built on the poorest, stoniest land at hand, and the little gardens of from one to two hundred square yards are by no means flourishing. The adobe houses contain two to four rooms and are roofed with tile. The floor is usually earth but sometimes flag’. Windows are rare, but the cabins are cheered by potted flowering plants.

Compared with some haciendas, San Gabriel is a paradise for peons. In the State of Michoacan I saw a chain of low hills looking out over a vast expanse of corn losing itself in the distance. On an eminence is an hacienda house, residence of the administrador, the master living no doubt in Mexico City or Paris, Then, for half a mile the scrub-clad hillside is pustuled with two hundred Lilliputian huts piled up from rocks. A man could hardly stand erect under the ridge-pole. One room, dirt floor, no windows, roofed with canes, shakes, or tiles. No bed save a straw mat, no covering save a serape. These habitations of men are smaller, leakier, damper, and mare noisome than those the master provides for his mules!

The hillside is covered with tiny patches, inclosed by high walls of stones, picked up to uncover a little dirt. Here struggle hills of corn and beans, the staple food of the workers. So on this poor declivity the peons have to dig themselves in like gophers, while a stone’s throw away the hacendado reserves his fertile level leagues to grow com ten feet high !

Returning to Don Manuel, it is plain that his system is fitter to make human vegetables than to make men. Since all live in his houses and on his land, Don Manuel is master of the situation. No one to whom he objects can come upon or be upon his principality. He owns six million mescal plants, and his huge distillery is not a stone’s throw from his house; but if any one on the place is caught supplying liquor to his peons, off he goes. Don Manuel is not above sowing wild oats himself, but when one of his peons makes his cabin a bawdy house or a gambling-den the man is evicted at once. Such paternal care for his people’s morals!

The priest in the hacienda church one Sunday preached a sermon denunciatory of the master’s dealings with his people, but the next day he apologized abjectly to Don Manuel and explained to his flock that he had been loco. Last year a “Bolshevist” came upon the place and began haranguing the peons under the big tree. He urged them to take the land and till it for their own benefit. Don Manuel attacked him — for insulting remarks about his family, he asserts — and pursued him to the borders of the hacienda, lashing him from horseback. Presently some soldiers came, but as Don Manuel and his brothers shut themselves up and showed fight they went away.

The peon type is timid, dependent, and unprogressive. A missionary who has worked in Mexico forty years notes among the Indians “an almost incredible apathy. Sometimes they appear as helpless as little children.” Again and again he has met with disappointment in trying to introduce improvements among them, such as persuading them to pipe water to the village from a spring half a mile away, to fill up holes so that in wet weather the roads should not become a quagmire, to bridge a stream dangerous to ford. To him it is nonsense to deny that the peon element is capable of development, but his hope is in the children, not in the grown-ups.

Says a British vice-consul:

Neither peon nor city workman has any thought of to-morrow, any instinct to save, or any desire to own land. This lack of ambition is racial. The pure Indian is absolutely unprogressive. He is stagnant, asleep, until he finds himself alongside foreigners.

Then he wakes up. The masses are capable of education, but it will take generations — at least two — even if every influence were brought to bear which the ruling element is capable of applying.

It is a commonplace that if you double his wages the Mexican laborer will work for you only half as many days. Even when you lay in his lap the means of living better he will not change. A mining engineer told me :

When I was running an American owned mine in Chihuahua it seemed to me a shame that the miners should be living under trees and in brush huts. So I got my company, which had made 42 per cent that year and was feeling cheerful, to allow me $25,000 for housing. I built sixty little two-room cabins, each with proper door, windows, and floor. Well, sir, would you believe that by the end of a year there wasn’t wood enough in those cabins for a toothpick? They had sold doors, windows, locks, and hinges, and destroyed the floor by building their fire in the middle.

In his way of life the peon is as mobile as a graven image. A mining expert told me how he and his party prospected four weeks with a native guide. As they came to like him they repeatedly offered him their own food — bread, bacon, venison, jellies, and such like. He steadily refused them all and lived on nothing but parched corn with a little brown sugar sprinkled over it.

The typical peon does not want to stand alone and be left to look out for himself. An American who stood in high favor under Diaz recounts how, some years ago, he acquired an hacienda on which were about four hundred peons. With the place, of course, he bought the accounts against the peons, which amounted to twelve thousand pesos. Upon taking charge he called the peons together and told them that the work would go on as usual, but that in order to start right with them he forgave all debts from them to him. Henceforth they were legally free to leave the hacienda.

The next day to his surprise no peons appeared for work — nor the next. On inquiry he found that the peons felt that with the wiping out of their accounts they could no longer look to the master for help in trouble; so that sorrowfully they contemplated departing from the hacienda on which their forefathers had lived and died. The forgiving of their debts released them from the hacienda, it is true, but at the same time it released the hacendado from them. The master whose peons owe him nothing will the sooner rid himself of those who displease him. Hence, they were going away to seek a master who, by staking them, would restore to them their lost sense of security.

When the American learned this he called his people together and announced that their accounts would be recognized as still binding. At once their forebodings left them and the life of the place resumed its wonted course. The same man tells this story to illustrate the peon’s shrinking from responsibility. On either side of his hacienda he had a tract of woodland. Call these tracts A and B. He offered A to his peons on these terms: he would supply implements and seed, and they should clear the land, keep the first crop, and give him a third of the second and half thereafter. Tract B was offered for sale on these terms: he would advance implements, seeds, and supplies, and the buyer should keep the first crop but give him a quarter of the succeeding crops till the purchase price had been paid. The price was to be a dollar an acre. Not one peon touched Tract B.

The Revolution wiped out the debts which tethered the farm laborer to the hacienda, but still the peon is afraid to avail himself of this new liberty. He wants a master to lean on. I have not met one American who estimates that more than a tenth of the peons are equal to farming a piece of land successfully on their own account. The more common opinion is that perhaps two or three per cent might make good as independent cultivators. “While all the Americans, whether hacendados or not, denounce the inherited land system and agree that the thing to do is to get the land into the hands of those who cultivate it, without exception they put their faith not in the peons but in their children, provided they receive the right kind of education.

The recent break-up of the great estates in Latvia, Esthonia, Boumania, Bulgaria, and Jugoslavia has been followed by a marked decrease in agricultural production. The exportable surplus of eastern Europe is only a twentieth of what it was and includes few breadstuffs. In the words of the correspondent of “The Manchester Guardian,” “The peasant has come into his own but he lacks capital to develop it, the implements to work it, and the knowledge to improve it.” If this is the outcome there, what would be the outcome of the same process in Mexico? Compared with the Mexican peon, the peasant who has foozled it in eastern Europe is a competent and resourceful being.

IN Mexico, as logical outcome of a triumpliant popular revolution, is being carried out one of the biggest economic reforms of our time. In the early days the influence of Las Casas and other champions of native rights caused the royal council at Madrid, in drawing up the Laws of the Indies, to safeguard the interests of the subjugated. They sought to assure to the Indians the means of obtaining subsistence by reserving to each village with a church nearly a square league of land which should be the patrimony of the community and which might not be divided or sold. The grant to this ejido, as it was called, was confirmed in parchments dating, some of them, from the sixteenth century.

Despite the encroachments of the great landowners, many of the Indian communities retained their lands and worked them with success until, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a blow was struck at their very existence. The famous Reform Laws of Juarez, aimed at the vast holdings of the church, forbade the community o^vnership of arable land and thus forced the break-up of the ejidos. Formerly it had not been lawful to sell the ejido or any part of it without the explicit consent of every member of the community. Now the community was obliged to divide its agricultural common among its members.

Soon, by hook or crook, most of such parcels were gobbled up by local Ahabs. In some cases the Indian was tricked. Under Mexican law a mortgaged property is forfeit if the debt is not paid when due. An Indian who had mortgaged his land for a loan would bring his money on the appointed day only to learn that the creditor was “out of town.” On his return the debtor would proffer the money only to be told that it was too late. His land had become the property of the creditor.

There are Americanists who insist that the Indians were better off as subjects of Spain. Then the law, regarding them as minors, gave them special protection. The republic, with its ideal of equal rights for all and special privileges for none, deprived them prematurely of these safeguards. Juarez, himself an Indian, as he became a leading jurist and lawmaker of the “liberal” type, held to native juridical concepts no more than Diaz did. Hence, contrary to his intention, his legislation wrought harm to the Indians.

Under Diaz an attempt was made to establish land titles on a modern documentary basis. The “law of surveys” fixed a term within which every landowner must prove title and obtain a deed. As was, no doubt, anticipated, great numbers of Indians whose lands had been handed down from time immemorial, but who had never heard of the new requirement, were ousted and became wanderers when, at the expiry of the appointed term, they were unable to shows deeds for their properties. By this device individual, communal, and tribal lands, which for centuries had nourished their laborious owners, were incorporated into the public domain, from which they soon passed into the hands of the favorites of the Diaz regime.

The despoiling of the humble went to such lengths that in 1910, on the eve of the Revolution, the greater part of rural Mexico was incorporated in about eight thousand haciendas, i.e., holdings not looked after by the owner in person. In Chihuahua the notorious Terrazas had bought and filched and grabbed and wheedled together an estate of more than six million acres, which railroad trains required eight hours to cross. It was an area equal in extent to the sovereign state of Costa Rica. No wonder close students of history contend that the Mexican countryman was worse fed, clad, and housed in 1910 than he had been a century earlier.

Realizing that there would be no peace until land monopoly had been corrected, the leaders of the Revolution determined to make the Indian villagers independent of the hacendado by providing them with land on which they might grow their food. Early in 1915 the Carranza Government put out an “agrarian law” which called for a National Agrarian Commission, with a local agrarian commission in every State, which should pass on petitions for ejidos. If such were approved, the village should receive land either as “restitution” or “donation.” In case it appeared that the village had been wrongfully deprived of its ejido, the same should be restored to it without compensation, leaving untouched, however, holdings not exceeding 125 acres. To clear away the jungle of fraudulent transactions, the constitution of 1917 declared null and void “all the procedures, dispositions, resolutions, surveys, concessions, judgments, transactions, or auctions which, in whole or in part, have deprived of their lands, forests, and waters, the Co-owners, villages, towns, communities, tribes, and other corporations of people. …”

Wanting a claim for “restitution,” the village might be “donated” land sufficient to provide each head of a family or male over eighteen years of age with twelve and one half acres of irrigated land, or fifteen acres of plowland not irrigated, or inferior land in proportion. For villages near the city or the railway the allotment was one third or two fifths less. The new ejido was to be carved from the surrounding properties exceeding a certain maximum, which ran from 375 acres to 1250 acres according to the quality of the land.

Land reform was not pushed energetically under Carranza, and this was one cause of his downfall. Since the Obregon group gained power in May, 1920, much energy has been shown in putting through this program. Three thousand, or nearly one half, of the villages of Mexico, have petitioned for land. About one hundred have been denied land, two thousand are in provisional possession of land, while five hundred and twenty have had their titles confirmed. Of the lands acquired by this last group six hundred thousand acres have been “restituted,” while one million five hundred thousand acres have been “donated” out of the larger adjacent properties. Altogether, about a thousand haciendas have been nicked. The fortunate communities are now proprietors of forty-four hundred square miles, four times as much as they possessed formerly. If the twenty-four hundred villages not yet finally fitted out with ejidos fare as well as those whose cases have been disposed of, the total movement of land from private ownership into common ownership will approximate sixteen thousand square miles, i.e., the area of Massachusetts and New Jersey taken together, and the number of allotments into which this land will be divided may well range above half a million. It should be borne in mind, moreover, that the tracts with which the villages are being endowed are distinctly above the average of Mexican land. The proprietors, indeed, complain that it is the best portions that are being cut from their haciendas.

When the work is completed, it will take rank as one of the giant agrarian adjustments of history. In scope the land redistributions in ancient Greece, the work of the land commission of Tiberius Gracchus or that of the Irish Land Commission are hardly to be compared with it. For parallel, one must look to the achievements of the Russian commission which, in 1861, provided with land the twenty-four million emancipated serfs.

In the mean time, of course, there have been doubt and hesitation on the part of the landowners. Bankers will not lend them money, for no one knows how they will come out. Since the restoration of order agriculture has not picked up as it should. In some degree the spirit of enterprise has been impaired; but the peak of uncertainty is passed and this partial paralysis should disappear in the degree that settlement is arrived at and the labor of the agrarian commissions nears its conclusion. Land reform will then stand or fall according to its practical outcome. Will the villagers utilize the “donated” land as well as the hacendados did? If so, there will be an immense gain in happiness, independence, and manhood. The half-slavery of the rural masses will disappear, and the great landowner will have to prosper by other means than labor-skinning. Said to me one governor:

The creation of ejidos is justified because hitherto the Indians in the village have been entirely dependent for subsistence on the neighboring hacendado, who makes no effort to provide them with steady work. He gives a preference to the Indians settled about his ranch-house, and when he has no work for the villagers they may have to wander away in search of employment. The ejido affords them an opportunity to grow their food, so that they are more independent, and the landlord who wants their services will be obliged to pay them more and to furnish them with steady employment.

On the other hand I am bound to say that the wisest persons I met (excluding, of course, the landowners themselves) regard the re-creation of communal property in land on this large scale as a backward step. Commons for pasture are, indeed, desirable, but not commons for cultivation. Community land is not improved as private land is. Villages will not build storage reservoirs which should be built. Moreover, thoughtful Mexicans doubt if the new ejidos will be well tilled or even fairly administered. Judging from past experience they expect that many of them will fall under the control of crafty cliques and that the majority of the villagers will have no benefit from them. Now and then an agrarian commissioner shows himself dissatisfied with the ejido policy and wants a land law which will encourage the owners to break up the haciendas themselves.

Are we witnessing in Mexico a vast confiscation? The constitution requires indemnification, on a basis of assessed value plus 10 per cent, for all land “donated” to the villages. But compensation takes the form of government bonds. Now, since Mexico has a national debt of $363,000,000, which, with unpaid interest, amounts to more than half a billion, of which two thirds is owing to foreigners, these land bonds have no present negotiable value. The hacendados, therefore, stoutly refuse to accept them and insist that they are being robbed under the forms of law. Foreign governments, too, seem to regard such “compensation” as illusory, for 129 protests have been presented through diplomatic channels on behalf of foreigners owning or leasing haciendas affected.

A group of broad-minded American men of affairs, whose opinion on the land reform was sought, agreed that the adjustment was necessary to the appeasement of the masses but that it has been carried out in such a way as to leave much soreness. In some cases vengefulness has entered into the taking of lands. Moreover, instead of bringing the Indians and the hacendado together and trying to see what they might be brought to agree on, with the agrarian commission as mediator, it is the Indians that have been consulted; a decision arrived at between Indians and commissioners has been communicated to the landowners in the form of an order.

It is charged that land reform is being used as a cloak for blackmail. Fsom several sources I heard that the local commission makes gestures of bestowing ejidos upon villages which have not applied for them, the motive being to alarm and “shake down” the owners of the contiguous haciendas. It is avouched that the resulting sums are turned into the treasury of the Agrarian party. The charge crops up in so many places and is made by men of such high character that it may not be dismissed as a malicious fabrication.

Let it not be supposed, however, that the land appetite of proletarian Mexico is to be cloyed by the creation of ejidos, which, at most, will not bite off more than 10 or 15 per cent of the area in latifundia. As authorized by the constitution of 1917 and on lines which it lays down, several of the States have passed agrarian laws of their o^vn. Of these the pace-setter is San Luis Potosi, the public men of which wish to have it lead Mexico in constructive reform legislation as Wisconsin leads the L^nited States.

Here the hacendados are given a year to divide their estates, and if they neglect to do so the State may go about it. In the western semi-arid section of San Luis Potosi the owner may reserve for himself any block of ten thousand acres in his hacienda; in the middle section, seventy-five hundred acres; in the wellwatered eastern section, five thousand acres. The rest may be taken, divided into singlefamily farms, and sold to persons who are equipped to work a farm. The buyer pays down a twentieth of the purchase price and the rest in nineteen annual instalments. The farm cannot be alienated until fully paid for. No hacienda is divided unless there are on file enough applications for land to justify it. The hacendado receives the appraised value of his land, plus 10 per cent, in 6 per cent bonds which constitute a first mortgage on the farms created and, besides, are guaranteed by the State. A land bank to loan would-be farmers capital for equipment is needed to complete the scheme, for money is scarce and lenders get 18 per cent per annum. But capital for founding such a bank is not yet in sight. Meanwhile, the energetic governor is urging cooperative rural credit associations of the Eatfeisen type to draw in outside capital, and three such have already been formed.

It is interesting to note that this State is prodding owners to break up their latifundia by lowering the assessment for taxation on small holdings, while increasing that of the large holdings 10 per cent and of the largest 20 per cent. Moreover, next year those who own land in excess of the above-mentioned maximum will pay a progressive surtax”. One foreigner controls in this State half a million acres lying uncultivated. He receives a royalty from allowing men to harvest the volunteer henequen and from the wild goats which his estate produces. He will have to pay a right tidy sum.

Fortunately the authorities of San Luis Potosi do not aim to divide haciendas faster than applications for land are received. Nevertheless, the uncertainty as to when their surplus land will be taken and divided will deter owners from making any improvements on it and will thus hurt agriculture.

The States of Michoacan, Durango, and Zacatecas have passed laws modeled more or less on that of San Luis Potosi.

Last spring the State of Chihuahua passed a law which fixes the maximum holding at twenty-five hundred to ten thousand acres (depending on the water-supply), plus one hundred thousand acres of grazing land. Within six months one’s excess land must be subdivided into small tracts and placed on the market. The forced sale of so much land within a brief period in a State so sparsely peopled cannot but bring the selling-price down nearly to zero, so that it amounts to a confiscation of land in excess of the legal maximum.

Governor Truchuelo of Queretaro is a strong man. For example, he cleaned up the ejido matter in short order. He convened the fiftybig landowners in his small State, convinced them that land reform is inevitable, and got them to agree to fit out the twenty-five petitioning villages with ejidos and to take the bonds offered them. Now he proposes that his State break up the big haciendas by taxing landholders progressively according to the amount of their holdings and by fixing a term of years, say, seven, at the expiration of which no one in the State shall own land in excess of 3750 acres. The governor of Coahuila also is aiming to bring about the splitting up of the estates by means of progressive taxation.

Dr. Manuel Gamio, the head of the Bureau of Anthropology, who knows the Indian if any Mexican does, proposes that those desiring plots of land to till pay the owner 5 or 6 per cent per annum on its assessed value plus 10 per cent for a period of twenty years, at the end of which term the land is to be theirs. Since the assessed value, although based on the sworn statement of the owner, is generally not more than a half or a third of its selling-value, the Indian will make no bad bargain. As for the charge that the Indian does not want land and will not till it if he has it, he considers that nonsense. The hacienda Indian may be timid about striking out for himself, but the far more numerous pueblo Indians will jump at the chance of gaining farms of their own.

The State of Vera Cruz, on the other hand, has been notorious for its drastic land policy. I have it on good authority that, as a result, not more than 10 per cent of the land in cultivation there two years ago is bearing anything to-day.

One of our consuls vouches for the truth of the following:

A certain hacendado owned about twelve thousand five hundred acres of land, running back from a river. The part lying along the river was irrigated and growing watermelons. Between bottom-land and hills lay a stretch of arable land not irrigated, while the rest of the estate lay among the hills.

The state agrarian commission summoned him and informed him that they required fifteen hundred acres to be divided among the “congregation,” i.e., the people of the district, and that they would have to take one thousand acres of his land. He offered to furnish the whole fifteen hundred acres from the strip of his land between river-bottom and hills. They replied that they wanted just the bottomland, and would take that. The owner then asked that he be allowed first to remove his crop of melons, which would be disposed of in two months. The commission insisted that they must have the land at once and took it.

Eleven months afterward the former owner drew the attention of the commission to the fact that no work had been done upon the property and that the irrigation-system was rapidly deteriorating. The commission called upon the settlers to explain why they had not tilled the land. They said that they had no money with which to do so.

“But what did you do with the money you had from the sale of the melons?”

“Oh, we spent that!”

The land was restored to the original owner.

In Mexico’s struggle to end feudalism the hacendados cut no very gallant figure. Are they thankful that they were not chased off their estates for good and all, with never a sliver of compensation, as were the one hundred and ten thousand noble landowners of Russia? Not in the least. Their slogan is “Back to Diaz.” They are surprised at being called on to give up something for the common good and seem not to realize that there has been a great revolution in which their side lost.

One would suppose that the “associations of hacendados” would bring forth some constructive scheme to compete with the program of the reformers, would offer ideas as to how Mexico may extricate herself from the evil, inherited situation. But no. They will not cooperate, nor confess the reasonableness of sacrificing some of their lands in order to be secure in the enjoyment of the rest. Many have to let large fertile tracts lie untilled, yet are so fond of the social power that goes with vast estates that they split the welkin with their cries if they are required to yield or sell their idle acres.

The acting secretary of agriculture told me:

“Hacendados have come to me to protest against some small part of their estate being taken for public purposes who, under crossquestioning, had to admit that they had never set eyes on their ‘beloved hacienda.’ Others actually know less about their property than we do here in this office and offer to take for their land a price which is greatly to their disadvantage. Having lived abroad for years, they rate their estate by what a thieving administrador chooses to remit to them. Another with perhaps a quarter of a million acres fights to the last ditch against surrendering even a hundred acres to a village.”

His fine sensitive face flushed as he went on to say in exactly the words a Jacobin French seigneur might have used: “I was born of a landed family and am even now a landowner, but I have always had enough natural feeling to regard the peon whose toil made my land productive with pity rather than with disgust. In him I was able to see the possibilities of a man!”

Sometimes the land reformers are successfully withstood. The church is adamant against them, and in some oases the local priest, by denouncing the villagers petitioning for an ejido as “robbers” and menacing them with denial of absolution, has bluffed them into withdrawing their petition. A year ago an agent of the National Agrarian Commission arrived in a northern State in which the land problem is not acute. Presently he made plans to visit certain haciendas with a view to cutting off parts of them for the villages. In great trepidation the hacendados concerned consulted with the governor, but he only asked, “Have you no trees on your places?” They took the hint, and, learning that lynching was in the air, the agent had an opportune telegram which recalled him to the capital, whence he has never returned.

While all Americans in Mexico agree that land feudalism must go, with scarcely an exception they insist that the great estates can be got rid of without violating property rights or giving an opening for corrupt officials. They insist that the leaders of land reform are in the pre-scientific stage, guided by the European radicalism of 1848-90 rather than by the knowledge of society which has been built up in the last thirty years.

They deny that among the agricultural laborers generally there prevails any such landhunger as undoubtedly did prevail in “Zapataland.” The ordinary peon does not crave landownership. He shrinks from the efforts and responsibilities which ownership entails. Rare, indeed, is the peon who will ever make good as an independent farmer. However, if you catch them early and train them right, the sons of peons may be fitted to become farm-owners. The creation of a great body of yeomen like our American farmers will, therefore, be a slow process — not a matter of five years merely, but rather of fifty years.

So they condemn the state agrarian laws which will force upon the market quantities of land vastly in excess of the needs of qualified purchasers and tillers. Such laws may quickly destroy agricultural credit and check the improvement of rural lands, but they cannot raise up a host of competent, independent cultivators. The process of dividing the haciendas should proceed no faster than peons appear possessing the self-confidence, knowledge, and resources for tackling a farm with a prospect of success. One of the best qualifications for success is the possession of implements and of means for making a small initial payment. By untaxing the cultivated lands and laying a progressive tax on the remainder of the land holdings, according to quality and size, the hacendados would be impelled by self-interest to offer their excess of land in small holdings at a low price. By a skilful adjustment of the tax-rate land might be forced upon the market just as fast as there are peons ready to buy and till it.

1

FOR Mexican labor the Revolution was like a shifting of the earth’s axis which gives Nova Zembla the climate of Florida. Labor developed a grouch against Carranza on account of his making war on their more radical brothers in Morelos and Yucatan, and this was one reason why he was overthrown in May, 1920, with hardly a shot fired. The present Government is not for one class, but it is more of a labor Government than it is anything else. This is why all the attempts against it, whatever their slogans, emanate from the capitalistic interests. None of its predecessors has so heeded the desires of the workers. Labor leaders admit that the Obregon regime gives them as good an opportunity as they could reasonably expect. The secretary of the treasury, Sr. de la Huerta, during the seven months he was interim President, settled forty-three strikes and he settled them all in favor of labor. General Calles, secretary of interior, one of the strongest men in the cabinet, is equally pro-labor.

Why this Government of popular origin is so pro-labor that a Government of popular origin in the United States will not “recognize” it was explained to me by Luis Cabrera, the brilliant finance minister of Carranza ‘s cabinet, who is a sound economist:

“In your country the capital is native, while the labor is largely foreign, the result being that labor is weakened. Here it is just the opposite. Our labor is native, while the capital is largely foreign, the result being that capital is weakened. For this reason public opinion ^d government in Mexico are more sympathetic with labor than in the United States, although, to be sure, our Government is sometimes deterred from standing up for labor because of the international complications which may ensue.”

Under Diaz, who treated associations of workers as seditious, a labor movement had no more show in Mexico than a Methodist campmeeting would have in Mecca. The first stirring of this stagnant pool came in 1911, when three foreign anarchists, two from Barcelona and one from Italy went about telling the Mexican proletarians that the amelioration of their lot was perfectly simple. Let them chase away the capitalists, and at once the world will be theirs. Production would be as copious as before, but they would have all the product. Labor revolted, indeed, and helped put in power a Madero and a Carranza, but the pelado, the “skinned man,” remained skinned! Production went to pieces and the people came to want. Disappointed again and again, it was at last borne in upon the workingmen that mere revolting was not getting them anywhere, and so they began to give ear to leaders who told them that the shifting of political masters is not enough, that the betterment of labor’s lot is a matter of patient, long-continued education and organization.

Since the Mexican proletariat came to see that their salvation lies in construction rather than in mere tearing down, organization has grown like Jack’s bean stalk. Seven years ago there were no unions. Then the American railroad brotherhoods helped organize the Mexican railway men. The American Federation of Labor encouraged Mexican wage-earners to unionize. Five years ago there were 80,000 in the Confederacion Regional Obrera Mexicana. For 1920 the figure given is 400,000; for 1921, 580,000; for 1922, 650,000. The Confederacion now embraces 564 unions and grows faster than ever. There is one new union a day. Not only factory and farm workers are unionizing but there are unions of prisoners in the penitentiary who get their petitions for clemency posted on the bill-boards; unions of prostitutes against landlord extortions; unions of domestic servants, fruit-vendors, government employees, department-store workers, newsboys, and bullfighters. There are, besides, certain strong unions — such as the railroad brotherhoods with 47,000 members and the port workers with 15,000 — standing outside the Confederacion. That such mushroom growths are not yet very solid and close-knit goes without saying.

Mexico is a Sahara for the statistician, but there is reason to believe that it contains about three million farm laborers, a million industrial workers, and half a million in personal service. Ofiicials of the Bureau of Labor figure that perhaps 12 per cent of rural labor and 50 per cent of the mine and factory workers are organized. A big labor leader insists that 20 and 65 per cent are nearer the mark. In Yucatan labor is 100 per cent organized. Probably more of Mexican labor has been unionized than of American labor.

2

Small-bore business men shriek that the Mexican labor movement is led by puppets on wires pulled from Moscow. The truth is that it is well-nigh as indigenous as the cactus or the maguey. It responds not to foreign impulsions but to the situations and needs of the Mexican working-class. It is guided by men unacquainted with European social speculations. No Russian agents have been active in Mexico in recent years. Few foreigners have any influence on the course of the Mexican labor movement. Mr. Kelly, sent from our machinists’ union to help things move, is an organizer, pure and simple, and has nothing to do with policy.

Nor is the movement a creation of intellectuals. It is fomented and guided by genuine workers. While the central committee of the Confederacion has organizers in the field all the time, they are not professional organizers but real working-meii on special duty. In its struggle labor has had no support from the liberal professions, because these were manned exclusively by sons of the propertied. Only lately has there appeared a G rupo Solidario del Movimiento Obrera, the first sign of sympathy from the professions.

3

Organized labor’s symbol is a red banner crossed by a black diagonal, signifying, no doubt, the coming together of the two historic working-class movements, socialism and anarchism. But Mexican authorities no more regard this flag as a menace to the national flag than American authorities regard a Knightsof -Pythias banner as a menace to the Stars and Stripes. Quite the reverse of us, in Mexico labor can qualify as 100 per cent patriotic, while it is capital that is suspected of internationalism. Mexican labor is, indeed, fiercely nationalist, for the thing it most abhors and fears is the yoke of the foreign capitalist.

Nor does this symbol signify that self-conscious Mexican labor is out for socialism. Their leaders are “yellows” rather than “reds.” They understand very well that Mexico is far from ready for the “socialization” of her industries. No Lenin-Trotsky program for them. Not only were the goals of the Mexican labor movement fixed before Bolshevism came on top in Russia, but the fiasco there has bred caution. Mexican labor sent delegates to Russia to observe the new order there, and the report was unfavorable.

“Socialism” with the Mexican intellectuals is a broader term than with us. In conversation a governor, a fine specimen of young clean-cut intellectual, mentioned that he is a socialist.

“Do you wish the dictatorship of the proletariat?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to see all industries nationalized?”

“No.”

“Then, why do you call yourself a socialist?”

“Because I advocate a social program in behalf of the working-class.”

By this definition Roosevelt and Wilson would be socialists!

Inquiries in various centers failed to bring to light a single responsible political or labor leader who advocates the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the seizure of the factories by the working-men, or the immediate nationalization of industries. “We aim,” explained the secretary of the Confederacion, “not to be rid of the capitalists, but to substitute good capitalists for bad ones.” Labor chiefs see quite clearly that an uninterrupted inflow of foreign capital is the pulmotor that will resuscitate Mexico economically and that therefore capital must not be frightened away. They look for socialization to begin as soon as bodies of workers become sufficiently experienced, organized, and disciplined to run successfully, on the public account, the factories they work in. They expect the eventual disappearance of private capitalism, but by gradual process and not by an abrupt seizure of the entire field, such as occurred in Russia. Nor does any responsible leader advocate confiscation. They wish socialization to be brought about according to law and with full compensation to the expropriated.

Often I said to leaders: “You concede that the working-class is not ripe for running factories and admit that socialization will be a long gradual process. Then, why do you hoist that red-black flag, thereby scaring away the foreign capitalists whose investments are essential to your economic development!”

Some explain that they do it in order to make the Mexican working-class feel solidary with the working-class all over the world, which has been and still is largely socialistic in its goal. Others point out that a noble vision of the eventual triumph of labor and the utter disappearance of the capitalist class is to-day psychologically necessary. The prospect of a working-class development confined within the limits imposed by the necessities of private capitalism would not inspire the downtrodden peons with enthusiasm and hope. That may do for well paid American wage-earners, but the Mexicans, just because their present is so meager, need an Apocalypse.

As I see it, to contemplate substituting in Mexico public capitalism for private is utter folly. Men of the equipment and character for running nationalized industries with success are very rare. Incompetency and graft would prey upon and ruin public industry. An able public man, still young, told me how, some years ago, he had come back from Italy a communist and for six years had managed a state mine. Although his mine showed a profit, no other government enterprise did, and he came to see that in Mexico it is impossible, save in rare cases, for the Government to run enterprises successfully — not even the railroads.

The charge of “Bolshevism” crops up oftenest in connection with three States: Yucatan, Vera Cruz, and San Luis Potosi. Only the last of these have I visited. Governor Puerto Carillo of Yucatan is indeed a convinced socialist and Sr. Luis Cabrera tells me that, as a natural reaction against the worst capitalism Mexico ever harbored, the working-class there is all “red.” By thorough organization and concerted action the workers have been able to raise their wages to a dollar and a half or two dollars, the result being that the planters have employed only the labor required to gather their crops and have lacked the confidence in the future to put in the replacing crop of henequen which should mature some years hence. But this does not signify that Yucatan is on the highway to collective ownership of the means of production. Governor Tejada of Vera Cruz is socialistic, and certain of his policies are indeed working out disastrously for the economic life; but his State is still a long way from Moscow. Governor Nieto of San Luis Potosi is not at all a socialist but a progressive whose ideal is constructive legislation.

4

Bolshevism has spread somewhat along the lower levels, and it is Spaniards, not Russians, who are responsible. In fact, Mexico’s social conflicts have been greatly aggravated by the seventy thousand Spaniards in her midst. The grasping and cruel Spanish hacendados and administradores helped goad the peons into rebellion. The Spanish merchants not only took the utmost advantage of the ignorance and simplicity of their customers, but they were exceedingly cunning” and cruel moneylenders. One of the first revolutionary acts in a town was to chase away or hang the hated gachupines and loot their shops. Now, since the close of the World War, workmen and agitators made furious by persecution have been coming in from Spain and striving to infect Mexican laborers with their own fierce rebellious mood. In Spain the lot of the proletariat and the relations of social classes are so bad that these Spanish agitators inject a bitterness foreign to the Mexican labor situation. One of them will mount a cart and say to a crowd of workmen in the plaza :

“Whose toil built these factories and buildings? None but yours. You have produced them, and not the men who have sat in office chairs and now call these buildings their own. I can but tell you what is yours and what you should have. I can’t take it for you. I have told you what should be done. It is now up to you.”

The tenants’ movement which sprang up last summer in the slums of Mexican cities is likewise direct-actionist. In Vera Cruz the housing of the workers is, as an American consul put it, “utterly horrible — no sewering, no drains, no water, no cleansing — ^nothing!” The landlords were spending never a penny on these pig-pens and had for years done nothing to keep them fit for folks to live in. Yet they were profiteering to the limit. For a room that in 1910 brought six pesos, they were charging twenty pesos. At the last turn of the screw the tenants formed a union and agreed to pay no rent until there had been an adjustment. They demanded that rentals should not exceed those of 1910 by more than 50 per cent. They hung out red flags as a symbol of defiance, beat rent-payers, mobbed police making evictions, and broke open sealed premises in order to reinstate evicted members. “Still,” observes the consul, “it is doubtful if any but sensational methods would have aroused public opinion and brought about the agreement between landlords and tenants which closed the conflict. ” Disorders of precisely the same type would have broken out in New York City in the autumn of 1920 if the New York legislature had not rushed through remedial legislation.

Alarmed at the slipping of the Mexican workers from her control, the church is trying to marshal them into “Catholic unions,” or “free unions,” which submit themselves to the authority of the church, in policy as well as in doctrine, and pledge respect for the “fundamentals of the society,” i.e., religion, country, family, and property. It is asserted that two hundred thousand have been enrolled in two years and that new unions are established every week. The Jesuit, Father Castro, who from Guadalajara leads this movement, assured me that it rejects the class struggle philosophy and contemplates a strike as only a last resort. In view of the heavy taxation of Mexican industries and the state of the market he doubts if the wage level can be raised and expects that for the present the economic betterment of the worker can come only by temperance, thrift, and productive investment, issuing in the acquirement of a home or a farm. These unions have the good will of Catholic employers, and he counts on their building and loan associations being helped by well-to-do Catholics, who will show their sympathy by buying shares on which they will receive only a low interest.

This church-managed movement excites the sardonic mirth of men who risked their skins for the exploited workers years before the clergy showed any interest in their lot. Said a governor; “The organization of workingmen under Catholic auspices is a mere blind set up in the interests of the employers and the church. Wages will never be raised by means of these unions.”

An “anti-red” leader declared: “It is a scheme got up on behalf of the propertied, whom the church dearly loves. It has no other object than to split and thereby weaken the genuine unions. These Catholic unions have done nothing for labor, have not raised wages, or shortened the working day, or removed abuses, or championed labor legislation.” The heads of the Confederacion, who deny that there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand in the Catholic unions, regard them as an “open shop” dodge and expect them to crumble in two or three years.

Naturally, the churchmen dread seeing the wage-earners captained by persons whom in their literature they denounce as “generally base politicians and men without standards or conscience, incapable and unworthy of directing the working-class” who “pitilessly exploit and tyrannize over them.” The church resents the influence over labor of socialists, whose philosophy she abhors. However, it is not easy to see a future of achievement for labor-unions in the leading-strings of ecclesiastics and aided financially by employers and hacendados.[2]Comes now word that the Archbishop of the capital has come out against these unions because they lean too much to the side of labor. This makes their future very dubious.

5

In 1916 a proclamation was issued by President Carranza making it a criminal offense punishable by death for any workman to engage in a strike. However, the friends of the working-class took alarm and in Article 123 of the constitution of 1917 Mexican labor has been given a charter of rights such as no other labor ever had. Every device that has found favor anywhere is here. The article decrees the eight-hour working day, the seven-hour working night, the six-hour day for working children twelve to sixteen, no night-work for women and children, one day of rest in seven, a vacation on pay for child-bearing, a living wage, no garnishment of the living wage, enforced profit-sharing, cash wages, double pay for overtime, housing for working-men, accident compensation, safe and sanitary workplaces, right to organize, right to strike or shut down, enforced settlement of industrial disputes, three months’ wages for unwarranted dismissal, worker’s lien, immunity of wages from attachment, free employment bureaus, no contracting out of working-men’s rights, social insurance, cooperative building associations.

Although some of the States have legislated, so far the Mexican Congress has failed to enact laws to carry into effect these benevolent provisions. Just now organized labor is endeavoring to obtain federal laws creating a Ministry of Labor, protecting working women and children, providing compensation for industrial accidents, establishing social insurance, and giving federal inspectors authority in respect to factory hygiene and the settlement of labor disputes. The fact that a large mining company employing six thousand men pays on an average less than ten dollars each for the numerous fatalities in its service suggests how urgently legislation is needed.

That constitutional rights are not the same as cash appears from the fact that even now in many parts fifty cents a day is the going wage for common labor, while eighty-five cents is about the maximum, save in the capital, where it is a dollar and up. In the judgment of one of our consuls, Mexican labor is getting about 30 per cent of what the same labor would get in the United States.

6

Even the representatives of great foreign companies recognize that Mexican labor has been atrociously exploited and that this is one source of the luscious profits which gave Mexico the reputation throughout the world of being such a “rich” country. I heard of a cotton factory costing one hundred thousand dollars to build which cleaned up five hundred thousand dollars the first year. Statisticians aver that industrial capital there is as likely to make more than 30 per cent of annual profits as to make less. This is why the constitution declares, “In all agricultural, commercial, manufacturing, or mining enterprises, the workmen will have a right to share in the profits,” and “Such profit sharing shall be done by special commissions appointed in each community and subordinated to the Central Board of Conciliation to be established in each State.”

In 1921 the State of Vera Cruz passed a law (nicknamed by its enemies “the hunger law”) declaring that, after wages had been paid and 6 per cent on capital, the rest of the profits of an enterprise should be shared between capital and labor in a proportion to be determined by a special commission. Furthermore, a representative of labor should sit on every board of directors and be paid the same as other directors. The law was thro^vn out as retroactive by the federal courts in so far as it authorized the dividing of profits as far back as May 1, 1917, when the constitution went into effect. At present current profits are divided 75-25 and labor’s 25 per cent is not shared but is paid into an out-of-work insurance fund.

The workman has the right to be indemnified by three months’ pay if he has been discharged without just cause, on for being a union man, or for having taken part in a lawful strike. He has the same redress if he leaves his employ owing to bad faith on the part of the employer or mistreatment of himself or his family. No law has been based on this clause and it might not stand in the courts, but it guides the decisions of boards of arbitration. Employers say that in practice they have to pay dismissal wages unless they can show just cause for discharge. As a man’s fellows will not testify as to his being disobedient or incompetent, it is hard for them to prove just cause. Accordingly, employers have become very careful as to the quality of men they hire. If it is a case of hiring for an emergency or for a temporary purpose, it is made plain in the contract that one is engaged for the job. I found big smelters getting round the requirement by “laying off” undesired workmen and forgetting to take them on again when business expands. “Laying off” has become a verbal screen for dismissal. Again, the discharged man usually desires a commendatory letter from his employer to help him to another job. The employer refuses such a letter unless the man signs a statement that he is quitting the employment of his own free will. The oil companies have agreed among themselves not to pay the dismissal wage, and, since they are able to wear out the suitor by appealing the case to the higher courts, they have never been obliged to pay it.

It is certain that the employer now handles his men gingerly and is less likely to indulge in wanton and ruthless treatment of the individual. The worker has more rights and knows it. I wish, however, that instead of such an excessive penalty, the indemnity had been wages for two or three week-s, payable not solely for wrongful dismissal but for any dismissal not due to the fault of the employee. Such a right should accrue only to those who had been at least six months in the service of the employer. The idea is that every good man let out ought to be assured a little spell in which to look for another job.

Another conquest which will make the American wage-earner rub his eyes is the right to receive wages while on a justified strike. If a board of arbitration finds that a strike was lawful, i. e., a protest against some wrong done or right withheld by the employer, it may order him to pay the strikers all or a part of the wages they have lost. In a number of cases this has occurred. Only recently the settlement of the long strike in a big printing shop in Mexico City provided for three weeks’ pay for the strikers. Capital knuckles down because the Government may take over and run a concern of public utility in case the owners prove recalcitrant to the award of an arbitration board. A French cotton-mill in the capital discharged half a dozen men arbitrarily, and on its refusal to take them back the Government took it over and ran it until the owners gave in.

I saw nothing more significant in Mexico than the labor flag floating from a pole lashed to the curb in front of the door of a shop in which a strike was on. It was set up so that no union man or union sympathizer should seek employment there in ignorance of the situation. This hoisting of the labor symbol is reasonable enough, but imagine how an American chief of police would react to the idea!

Sometimes organized labor aspires to intervene in the management in a way that smacks of Bolshevism. A large American factory in Puebla has stood idle a year because the owner refused a demand from his workmen that he should hire or fire no one without their consent and that they should have the choosing of their foremen. The Federation of Tramway Employees in Mexico City demanded last May that its representatives should be consulted when any one is to be hired or fired; should “O.K.” the notes made in the service records of the workers; should have the right to watch over the movement of the company ‘s funds, and to intervene in the establishment of the routine of the different departments. The company refused, the men struck, and, properly enough, the strike was lost. There are certain controls which the capitalist cannot forego without presently ceasing to function.

The manager of a big cotton factory in Atlixco, a mill town nestling between the toes of the giant foot of Popocatepetl, sketched me this situation: No one may be hired or fired without the consent of the union. Accordingly some of the weavers, who receive piece wages, hire boys to work their looms. On Saturday, after having loafed the week, they draw the pay for the product of their looms, pay the boys, say, twenty-five cents a day, and pocket the difference. At least ten weavers are exploiting boys by this game, but the manager dares make no move to uproot the abuse.

So long as Mexican labor demands a share in the internal management of the business, there will be turmoil and occasional violence calling for military measures. These ignorant inexperienced men, with bitter memories of heartless exploitation and bloody repression, will make every possible mistake and in some instances bring upon themselves and their industry every possible harm before they learn what may and what may not be claimed by labor within the limits of private capitalism.

8

Eight-hour day, Sunday rest, double pay for overtime, dismissal wage, strike pay, legal boards of arbitration in seven States — these take one ‘s breath away. Surely capital is preparing to shake from its shoes the dust of a country that tolerates such labor tyranny! Well, such is not the case. Even without the old labor-skinning, there are nice juicy profits still to be had in Mexico. Whatever they may say for public consumption, in private many capitalists admit that they are accommodating themselves to the new situation and intend to go ahead. One afternoon I called on the managers of two smelters and a steel works in a northern city. Between them they employ nearly five thousand men. None reported any extreme or unreasonable demands from their unionized men. They have no anxiety lest their men succumb to “red” propaganda. As they see it, their future hinges much more upon the stability of government than upon the attitude of their labor. In another city an American smelter man said: “Labor is nowadays harder to manage, and occasionally it demands the unreasonable. It will have to learn by chastening experience what rights it must respect in capital. I do not deplore the spread of organization among the working-men. It had to come, and it is legitimate.” The American head of a light and power company observed: “There is much less Bolshevist sentiment here than in 1915-17. The country is getting better right along. The productivity of Mexican labor has gone down a half since the beginning of the Revolution, and the wage has gone up a quarter in the last three years. But in five years we have had no strikes in any of our five plants in different towns, common labor costs only fifty cents a day, and we have no fear of the future. We can rub along and make money even with this demanding labor.”

9

While the rural laborer may be getting only thirty cents a day and a quart of shelled com, there can be no question that the town workers are better off to-day. In the capital, maids who once served for two dollars a month now get six to ten dollars. Men who used to work for twenty cents a day now earn seventy-five cents or a dollar. The cost of living has mounted but not so much, so that there is a net gain which will grow as, more and more, the wheels turn and the devastation left by the civil war is repaired.

However, the chief blessing from the Revolution is the New Spirit. Penury is still the lot of the common laborer, but there is now fire in his heart, hope in his eye. Full well he knows that his children are not to be serfs. The will to be free has broken the fetters which appeared to be forging in the later period of Diaz. Myriads daily go ill fed to work just as toilsome as ever, but they mind it less because, far and faint, they hear a song of good cheer. Sullen or desponding they are not, for the laws and the Government are not against them as erstwhile, and they realize that the future is in their own hands.

Formerly, under the joint pressure of caste, wealth, laws, state, and church, the Mexican worker was a flattened man — a helot, ignorant, humble, and timid. Now, with his new-found self-confidence and courage and aspiration, he is dangerous to mockers. For example, there are twenty thousand unionists in the capital. Their last May-day parade was jeered at and insulted when passing the Knights-of-Columbus headquarters by young men of the privileged class looking on from the windows. The workers broke ranks, swarmed into the building, gutted it, and set it on fire. Even the chapel containing the altar and image of the Virgin was wrecked. When the church authorities planned a public protest demonstration, the unions sent word that they had better not do it, and the demonstration was called off.

In Puebla I witnessed a great demonstration against the shooting of certain leaders in a street fight in Atlixco between unionists and “free laborers.” Twelve thousand union workers paraded the streets and massed before the state-house in order to speak to the governor. Half the workers were barefoot or in sandals. Organized according to shop, each union followed its red-black banner. There was nothing truculent or sinister in their air — only a firm step and a high head which few Mexican factory operatives showed ten years ago.

A Welsh mining engineer of wide experience in many parts said :

“This is a new Mexico. Economically the Indian miner is a little better off, but psychologically he is altogether different. It is dangerous now to beat or kick or curse him. You have to speak to him .and treat him as if he were a British Columbia miner. He is no longer a cowed man. He feels that his kind are on top and he straightens up with a newborn sense of self-respect.”

10

Cheering signs there are in abundance.

Organized labor is waking up to the drink evil. In Monterey the working-men paraded the streets on behalf of Sunday closing of saloons. Their banners bore such sentiments as, “Working-men do not go to the saloon; go to school!” “We want schools and no saloons!”

Since the Revolution the workers are beginning to abandon their distinctive garb of unbleached cotton, which marks them off from the other classes — who wear dark wool clothes — and are wearing dark blue jumpers.

In Morelia, the beautiful capital of Michoacan, three years ago some workmen, tired of vegetating in one room, squatted on some vacant upland at the edge of town owned by the municipality. One governor tried to make them pay, but the next let them have it for nothing. Each family gets three eighths of an acre. Sixty families have built their little cabins, and there is room for two hundred more. After a man has done his eight hours, instead of hanging about the saloons, he hurries out to his cabin and hoes his com and beans. The colony has a fine community swing and is building a stone reservoir at the crown of its hill. Some of the habitations have tiled roofs and look permanent, although most of them are huts of the rudest. In five years, all these laborers, earning from fifty cents to a dollar and a half a day, will have comfortable homes in a perfect climate with a glorious view across the city to the mountains. A shoemaker with clear smiling eyes told how he worked at his bench till weary, then went out into the fresh air and tended his garden. I met six of these colonists, and all had the look of free and happy men.

I was shown about by a saddler who spoke excellent Spanish and is an unpaid leader of labor. Three months before, he and six other saddlers started a cooperative shop. They paid themselves just what they were getting, viz., seventy-five cents a day. Now each has forty dollars of dividends, i. e., they have increased their earnings by 68 per cent.

Consider, too, the spirit of self-help sho^vn by the longshoremen’s union of Puerto Mexico. It formed a company, leased a government wharf, and, with fifty thousand dollars lent by the State of Tamaulipas for the purchase of machinery, set up for themselves last May in the business of loading and unloading vessels. Although the ocean tonnage entering the port has greatly shrunk, owing to the petering out of oil wells, in its first three months this cooperative has repaid seventeen thousand five hundred dollars of the money lent it and is helping the longshoremen’s union of Vera Cruz to do the same thing in their port. Thus the workers pocket, along with their wages, the profits formerly reaped by the contractor who bought their labor and sold it by the job to the steamship line. Some of the shipping companies have tried desperately to save the contractors from elimination and force the workers back into their former subjection, but their moves have been checkmated.

In the government army clothing factory in Tacubaya, a suburb of the capital, where thirteen hundred women and five hundred men are employed, welfare work touches its zenith. There is a huge dining-room where at noon the workers can sit down, each at his numbered place, and find before him his lunch-basket with the same number. An orchestra from themselves plays while the workers eat. There is a free nursery for babies and a free outdoor kindergarden. There is a big paved porch for callisthenics and a grassy court for the little folk to play in. There is an emergency ward, shower-baths are provided, and a sanitarium is under construction. Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evening a movie-theater seating 850 presents educational films to the workers. The statistician of the Bureau of Labor assured me that the cost of production here is the lowest of any factory in the Republic; yet the women are the only body of female factory-workers I have ever seen who did not exhibit signs of overstrain.

Morones, the manager of this establishment, who has risen from the ranks, is an outstanding figure in the Confederacion and in the Labor party, the political reflection of the Confederacion. He looks forward to the gradual shrinking of the field of private capitalism as group after group of workers, with their savings or with an extension of government credit, become able to buy and run a concern on their own account, I asked him, “Has your experience as manager made you more hopeful or less hopeful as to the possibility of dispensing with private capitalist domination of industry?”

He answered, “It has encouraged me in my hope that eventually the workers will be competent to manage the concern themselves.”

11

It is not easy for the American capitalist in Mexico, be he never so fair-minded, to fathom the peon’s mind. A big business man of the finest type, with a quarter of a century’s experience in Mexico, was telling a group of us how perfectly contented and happy the peon is living in a one-room hut along with fowls and pigs. In the next breath he told how there would be, perhaps, one blanket or skin to the family and how, in the cold nights, one member of the family, after using it a couple of hours, would yield it up to some other member and crouch the rest of the night over a little fire in one corner of the hut! The fact is, such men stand quite outside the minds of these poor people and do not know their worries, thoughts, or aspirations. Because laborers who have been given tents fail to set them up but build instead their tiny jacals, it is inferred that they stupidly prefer such habitations. The outsider does not allow for the ignorance, timidity, and habit-bondage of the Indian.

All the American employers insist upon the latent capacity of the Mexican worker. All the Monterey managers praise his reasonableness and contend that he is easy to get along with if you do not “try to put something over on him.” A mine manager I met in Guadalajara, with forty-two years of experience in Mexico, had found that his work-people were contented if you gave them a square deal. They never gave him any trouble, for he ran a company store, sold goods at 10 per cent, above cost price, and so saved his men 30 per cent, of their wages.

An American who, in his twenty years, had handled thousands of men on contracts in every part of the republic considers them a fine people — primitive, but full of possibilities. They are backward because they have never had a chance. The children are bright and eager. The arrest of intellectual development, which psychologists attribute to the onset of sex interest, he ascribes to their coming to realize the hopelessness of their outlook. The key to their uplift will be education and opportunity.

He marveled at the honesty of the Indians. He would have ten or fifteen carrying sacks of silver pesos on their backs to his constructioncamp fifty miles from the railroad. None ever ran away with his silver. He would have as much as twenty thousand dollars in his tent just before pay-day. He was the only white man among thousands, and unarmed; yet he and his silver were perfectly safe.

Labor does not of itself hate the gringos. One of our consuls points out — and I have confirmation from other sources — that the American employer in Mexico differs from the native or South-European employer in seeing to it that his working-men are well paid, well fed, well clad, well housed, and provided with schools and hospitals. If he ran a store, it was to serve his people, not to extract another profit from them. He knew that it is good business to make your workers contented. But the local hacendado or mine operator became a gringohater because the American employer drew away his best men and obliged him to pay his labor more and do more for them.

To sum up:

The labor movement beyond the Rio Grande is, on the whole, normal and healthful. Without it the workers would reap little from the Revolution. The foolishness and crime that accompany it are but the foam on the wave. Wild talk and occasional fights between unionists and non-unionists do not portend that Mexican wage-earners are going to turn against their country, abandon their religion, or harry their employers until they quit in disgust. Their leaders are probably no more rabid than were the American labor leaders thirty-five years ago. Dangerous tendencies, instead of growing, will slowly disappear, as Mexican labor registers economic and social progress and comes to feel itself strong and secure.

1

AT first blush the Catholic church, which has the allegiance of at least 95 per cent of Mexican adults, seems to be hounded and persecuted by the state. By the constitution of 1917 it is forbidden:

To own real estate or mortgages on same.

To own church buildings or any other buildings.

To possess invested funds or other productive property.

To maintain convents or nunneries.

To conduct primary schools.

To direct or administer charitable institutions.

To solicit funds for its support outside of church buildings.

To hold religious ceremonies outside of church buildings.

To clothe its ministers with a garb indicative of their calling.

Ministers of religion may not publicly criticize the fundamental laws, the authorities in particular, or the government in general. They may not vote, hold office, or assemble for political purposes. Clergymen may not inherit real property occupied by a religious association, or inherit from fellow-clergymen or from private individuals not blood relatives. No assembly of a political character may be held in a place of public worship. No political party may bear a name indicative of relation to any religious belief. No religious periodical may comment on political affairs. No studies carried on in theological seminaries may be credited in a state university. Official permission must be obtained before opening a new temple of worship for public use. The state legislature may determine the maximum number of ministers of religious creeds according to the needs of a locality. Marriage appertains to the exclusive jurisdiction of the civil authorities, although, of course, a religious ceremony may follow it.

In the Laws of Reform of 1856, the Constitution of 1857, and the laws enacted under it one finds:

The suppression of monasteries and the nationalization of their property.

Prohibition of novices ‘ taking the veil.

Abolition of religious holidays save those specified by law.

The ringing of church-bells to be subject to local ordinances.

Municipalization of cemeteries.

From this bristling array one may safely deduce that Mexico has been the theater of a prolonged and desperate struggle between church and state.

2

As far back as the middle of the last century it became clear to the Mexican liberals that popular government would never have a chance in Mexico so long as the Catholic hierarchy, controlling two thirds of the productive wealth of the country, dominated economic life and monopolized the great opinion-forming agencies, religion, education, and charity. The issue was between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, and there was no evading it. The “little Indian” President, Juarez, in his famous Laws of Reform sought by suppressing the convents and nationalizing the vast properties of the Mexican church to transform it from a huge secular power into a religious institution pure and simple. The Constitution of 1857, which was to survive till 1917, is acrid with the smoke of this conflict.

The hierarchy resisted for ten years and earned the hate of the Mexican patriots by bringing about the French intervention by Napoleon III and the fatuous Hapsburg empire. When, in 1867, Maximilian fell before the firingsquad on the hillside by Queretaro, it was settled that nineteenth-century political ideas were to have their innings in the land of Montezuma.

In the earlier years of his regime General Diaz feared ecclesiastical encroachment and upheld the Laws of Reform. But subterfuges were found. In order to get around these laws the title to church property was very often vested in the name of some prominent Catholic, the understanding being that he was to hold it in trust for the benefit of the church. As time went on, however, not infrequently he became accustomed to look upon the property as his own, with the result that finally he ceased to turn over any of its proceeds, and the church — or, according to the Constitution of 1857, the nation — was robbed.

Owing in a measure to the influence of Senora Diaz a modus vivendi presently grew up between state and church, so that in the latter part of Diaz’s rule the laws were not consistently enforced. The church-bells shattered the morning quiet as of yore, parish schools spread, and religious processions reappeared.

The revolutionary period, 1911-20, was a via dolorosa for the church. Recognizing it as the main prop of land feudalism, the revolutionists treated it as a political enemy. There were numerous atrocities, and in 1913-15 many ecclesiastics hid themselves or fled for their lives. In order to destroy in their ignorant rustic followers every vestige of superstitious regard for things ecclesiastical, the revolutionary generals purposely had their soldiers, along with their female camp-followers, eat, drink, gamble, and sleep in the churches. When the peon noted that no fire fell from heaven to punish the sacrilege, he concluded that his priest had been deceiving him.

Since the fighting ended the church has been recovering some of the ground lost. In west central Mexico you might imagine yourself in Ecuador or Peru. In Morelia the church-bells begin ringing about five o ‘clock in the morning, and for the next hour and a half there are not five minutes of quiet. In Guadalajara there are said to be at least half a dozen nunneries, and Mexico City harbors several, although such houses have been forbidden for sixty-five years. Most of them are made up of serving nuns, although some of them are of the cloistered type, the nun not being permitted to converse with an outsider save through a grating and in the presence of two other nuns. Although in the northern States of Mexico the church confines herself to secondary education, in the States of Puebla, Michoacan, and Jalisco she has her primary schools, although the law forbids them. Neutrals observe that rigid enforcement of the law would result in a grave set-back to popular education, for the public schools are simply not equipped to care for the children now enrolled in parish schools.

All this is natural enough, for ecclesiastics flourish in a state of peace while politicians thrive iii an atmosphere of revolutionary unrest and violence. In the present tranquillity certain advantages of the church over the state come into view. Ignoring for the moment the idealists in both camps, we observe that in contending for power and wealth the ecclesiastical organization has it over the political organization in that it looks further ahead. Moreover, the captains of the church stick more loyally by their ship than the captains of the state. The self-seeking ecclesiastic works for the church all his life, knowing that it will take care of him all his life, while the self-seeking politician abandons politics once he has got what he wants.

3

There are signs, to be sure, that the Mexican church is moribund. The proportion of young men of good family taking orders is small and is alleged to be getting smaller. No one marks any improvement in the quality and education of the clergy, but rather the reverse. The church has not vitality enough to establish itself in new mining centers; so one hears of large communities without christening or confession.

Nevertheless, of late the church has been pulling herself together. About three years ago the Mexican newspapers gave much space to the Interchurch World Movement here and its plan to raise a third of a billion dollars to advance the cause of Protestantism throughout the world. At once the Catholic hierarchy took alarm and prepared a counter-offensive. The women were marshaled as “Catholic Ladies” while the young men were organized as “Associations of Youth” and “Knights of Columbus,” on lines which have proved so successful in the Y.M.C.A. and Y.P.S.C.E.

With the promotion of militant organization has come a recrudescence of hostility to Protestant missionary effort. In recent months have occurred several instances of popular violence toward the American missionaries. Again and again, the stoning and mobbing of evangelicals has brought no action by a Government which has its hands full elsewhere. At a recent convention of Methodists in Toluca the local people were given to understand that the thousand delegates were Bolshevists receiving a dollar a day for their attendance! The women missionaries are beginning to shun any large concourse from fear of being insulted. With a people so polite and gentle as the Mexicans this can only mean that they are being systematically stirred up and egged on.

However, the missionaries have no fear of a return of the bigotry of a quarter of a century ago, when in some places shopkeepers would not sell the necessaries of life to the Protestant missionaries, who would have to have a policeman accompany them and force the dealers to sell them what they needed. The present persecution cannot go much farther without proving a boomerang. The Government, which is anything but clerical, recognizes that the missions benefit the people and cherish no political aims. It will never allow them to be harried out of the country.

4

The Protestant missionaries do not complain of being hampered in their work by the constitutional restrictions forbidding a religious body to own church sites or cemeteries or engage in primary instruction. The Government has encouraged them to go ahead with their schools and to have no anxiety. Against them the Government is not on the defensive as it is against the church.

Assuredly religious freedom prevails in Mexico so far as the laws can insure it, for there is no interference with religious rites or functions on the part of any body of believers. Nevertheless, the church is extremely resentful of her actual constitutional status and insists that she is “persecuted.” Archbishops and others high in the hierarchy tell me that the church wants the right to own the land she needs for her edifices, to maintain charitable institutions, to conduct schools of any grade, to have the services of foreign priests, and to have as many priests as she deems fit. They insist that the Mexican public schools turn out atheists and that the church must have her own system of schools, although some are candid enough to admit that the church is not equal to handling the job of popular education.

I found some public men who favor the repeal of the exclusion of foreign priests and of the limitation of the number of priests. They would not object to parish schools provided that, in qualifications of teachers, course of study, texts, and standards, such schools conform to the requirements of the Department of Public Instruction.

On the two crucial questions, the restoration to the church of her former immense endowments and the permission to open religious houses, I was unable to obtain from her spokesman a clear, unequivocal declaration of attitude.

There is a plaintive note in the plea of the Mexican church for the same rights the American Catholic church enjoys. In the United States clergymen may vote, hold office, organize political parties, teach in educational institutions, appear in public places in clerical garb, conduct religious services outdoors, lead religious processions through the streets, and solicit funds anywhere; whereas none of these things are permitted to Mexican priests.

Says an American Catholic bishop:

The Government permits Protestant churches operated by foreigners to do what the Church of the People is not allowed to do. Every Protestant missionary not born in Mexico exercises his office unlawfully. Every Protestant mission school exists unlawfully and every student receiving credits toward a Mexican professional degree from such studies in such school does so unlawfully.

On the other hand, a prominent American Catholic business man observes:

I do not believe that there are over ten thousand really influential men in Mexico. “While it may be true that 95 per cent, of the whole people are Catholics, I am of the opinion that not 25 per cent, of the ten thousand influential men are Catholic, I would say that probably one thousand or 10 per cent, are Catholic. I feel quite sure that the vast majority of the influential men of Mexico would very vigorously oppose any legislation that had for its object the return to the church of its former properties.

The Liberals, who, as a director of schools told me, have never constituted more than a quarter of the adults in Mexico but include three fifths of the brains, say in effect :

“Let the church abandon her arrogant pretensions and devote herself to promoting religion, and all exceptional laws aimed at her will soon disappear. Let her eschew politics and concern herself with the spiritual welfare of her people. Let her resign herself, as the Catholic church has done in other parts of the world, to the coexistence of a civil government which she does not control. Let her recognize that she cannot have a monopoly of the influences which mold the mind, and the state will no longer need to be on guard against her.”

5

Several American Protestant churches maintain missions in Mexico, some of which have half a century behind them. In order to avoid duplicating efforts, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Disciples, Lutherans, and Friends have divided among themselves the Mexican field of labor. The Baptists and the Episcopalians decline to come into the arrangement. The Methodists look after Mexico City and the surrounding region, and they report for 1921 a gain of 2500 members. In this field a better feeling has grown up between the two great Christian bodies. Some of the older missionaries, recalling how they were persecuted in the earlier day, hit the church hard, but the later comers try to”‘ ‘pull men to Christ rather than pull them away from the church.” With the better bishops and padres the missionaries are coming to have pleasant personal relations.

There can be no doubt that Protestant competition has had a very great effect in rousing the church from her self-complacency and stimulating her to do more for her people. Since the spur was felt the Catholics have put seats into their churches, where formerly the worshipers stood. The clergy preach regularly, whereas formerly a sermon was heard only on the local saint’s day. They are putting in Sunday-schools to some extent and are more active in providing schools and playgrounds. The Bible is more read by the Catholics. Religion is becoming more personal and one comes upon something like our “revivals,” with services every evening. An obligation to conduct social welfare work is more generally recognized within the church. The Knights of Columbus are beginning to conduct evening classes for young men of the working-class and an employment bureau. The priests are becoming ashamed of certain superstitious practices which once they countenanced, e.g., blessing animals and hanging Judas in effigy.

The need of making their message more vital, social, and appealing is restoring to the Catholic clergy some of the apostolic spirit. One wonders, indeed, if this invigoration and socialization of the church is not the more important fruit of evangelical work in Mexico. For there is abundant room for doubting if Protestantism has a large future in Mexico. For a long time the masses will be ignorant simple-minded people to whom the symbolic and dramatic features of Catholic worship will irresistibly appeal. The Protestant religious services, with their emphasis on ideas and rereflection, little attract people at the peon stage of intellectual development. The Catholic appeal to the emotions by means of picture and sculpture, song and litany, gesture and genuflexion, wins them. Then, too, it should be borne in mind that the Mexicans are very sensitive to beauty. Nowhere else save in Japan have I seen people so given to the growing of flowers!

Now, while at times you feel that some features of Catholic church interiors are garish, in general these interiors are most appealing. Those who planned these churches were in high degree gifted with good taste and a passion for beauty. In contrast with these marvelous effects in form and color and tone, the Protestant churches and services seem bare and bleak. At best, of course, they do rise to a severe noble beauty, but, in general, the Protestant church is congenial to one’s intellect and concience rather than to one’s sense of beauty. It seems to me, therefore, that, for the coming half-century, at least, the Mexican people will remain overwhelmingly Catholic. The missionaries should reconcile their hopes with this outlook and content themselves with their very great service in raising the plane of popular education and keying the work of the church to a higher and more social note.

1

THE beginnings of a system of public education in Mexico date from 1867, when the final defeat of a church which for ten years had been intriguing against the Reform Laws of President Juarez, and which had brought upon the people the afflictions of a French occupation and an Austrian emperor, opened the way to destroying her cherished monopoly of mind-molding. Little, however, was done to dispel the ignorance of the masses until near the end of the nineteenth century. From 1884 to 1911 President Diaz was an uncrowned monarch. In the first half of his reign he conceived of the progress of Mexico in material terms. He bent his efforts to economic development. He subordinated everything to the building of railways, harbors, docks, and like public works, to the luring in of foreign capital to open mines and multiply factories.

Later, Don Porfirio came to realize that spiritual factors had a place in the advancement of his people, and so, about 1895, he embarked on the policy of planting a public school in every village. A big American contractor testifies:

When, about 1900, I began operations here, I never saw one of my workmen reading a newspaper before work began or while nooning. By 1910 it was a very common thing. In Mexico City in 1900 you never saw a man in a serape scanning his paper in the street-car on his way to work. But this came in so fast that it excited much comment. These new hornyhanded readers were products of the Diaz schools.

Nevertheless, the 1922 federal appropriation of $25,500,000, for education is sevenfold what was annually expended under Diaz. Don Porfirio used to thrill assemblages of teachers with the dramatic avowal that he wished to be remembered as “the first schoolmaster of Mexico.” He may have meant it, but he was not really in control of the situation. A former Diaz governor, distinguished for his promotion of popular education in his State, told me that in his hearing the dictator had declared, “A people without education is like a boiler without a safety-valve.”

“Why, then, Mr. President, don’t you educate your people faster?”

“Ah, my friend, I am not all-powerful as many people imagine. On the one hand, the hacendados oppose popular education lest the peon should want more and ask more wages. On the other hand, the church is hostile to it, and even in my own family I meet opposition.”

Senora Diaz, as is well known, was under clerical influence and did her utmost to shape her husband’s policies to the advantage of the church.

In any case, Diaz did not take up education early enough nor heartily enough. If only he had pushed enlightenment with any thing like the energy with which he pushed material development! In the embellishment of the capital he lavished sums which, had they been expended in dispelling the cloud of ignorance which hung over the land, might have averted the social explosion that shattered his painfully wrought fabric.

With him the great thing was “front.” There were certain good school buildings in the capital, and the foreign notable was always taken through these show places. The scores of miserably housed schools were never visited. In 1917, after six years of revolutionary devastation, a Carranza superintendent of public instruction got more children into the schools of the Federal District than Diaz had at his zenith. In his later years the aged President felt jealousy of any one who was winning popularity, so that a governor making war on ignorance had to be furtive about it. The governors of two of the States became so popular from their promotion of public elementary education that Diaz removed them. Their successors were expected to let the schools lapse into their former condition.

Yet old Bourbon aristocrats told me that Diaz’s fatal mistake was in not leaving education entirely to the church. “State schools can never train the masses to keep their place,” insisted a great landowner, angered because some of his acres were being taken to create ejidos. “Only the church can instil the motives which will make the childlike, ignorant peons truthful, obedient, and regardful of the rights of us property-owners.”

When Diaz quit the helm about a third of the children were in school. But during the revolutionary turmoil education suffered a great set-back. In all tlie universities and state “preparatory” schools, you will find that not a book, a piece of apparatus, or a stick of furniture has been added in ten years. Many teachers were fain to take up other pursuits to keep from starving. For a long time yet Mexico will be hampered by the generation that grew up in 1911-21 without the opportunities which even the Diaz regime had provided.

2

The revolutionary leaders have quite broken with the aristocratic ideal of education as the prerogative of the children of the more fortunate classes and with the church’s ideal of education as an opiate to make the masses insensible to the hopelessness of their lot. They accept, without reserve, the democratic ideal of education for “all the children of all the people.” However, there is a very significant divergence between the views of the revolutionaries on the one hand and those of the Americans in Mexico and the Mexicans educated in the States on the other.

The latter regard at least 95 per cent of the peons as “hopeless.” You will never make of them independent farmers or citizens. They are too timid, childlike, unprogreseive. “With them dependence on a master has become a second nature. They are good for nothing but to work on wages for the rest of their lives. The hope is in their children. If you can reach them with the right kind of an education, you can fire them with ambition to live better than their parents and advance to a higher social plane. The beginning of the ascent of the masses waits on popular education, the one key to the regeneration of Mexico. Nothing else really matters.

The Revolutionaries deny that the masses are 30 incurably unprogressive. They insist that the peon’s standard of living can be changed. He is without aspiration because he has been little better than an item of live stock on the hacienda. All his life so far he has been drugged by the reflection, “What’s the use?” Open a fair prospect before these poor quartermen, and many of them will respond, not at once, to be sure, but in two or three years. So give them a chance. Bring the ownership of land within the easy reach of the apathetic rural laborer. Let the town worker have more of the value he produces, and let him see more wages coming his way if he proves himself worth more. Then you will see their psychology change.

So the reformers attach great importance to the land reform and the labor movement and do not pin all their hopes to education, as the Americans do.

The truth seems to lie between the two. The radicals and socialists have such faith in the magic of Economic Opportunity that they do not see the Indian as he really is, a man with a fogged brain. The Americans in Mexico, on the other hand, overlook some of the slower, inconspicuous processes going on about them.

In San Luis Potosi I spent an hour with nine judges, deputies, and public men discussing this very question, and they agreed that the adult Indian is improvable. True, if you double his wages he is likely to work only half as many days, a fact which every American in Mexico cites as a clincher. But open to whole groups such an opportunity and in a few years their standard of living will have risen. At first a few work full time and live better. The others, seeing this, begin to crave like comforts for themselves. Ere long nearly the whole group will be moving up the scale. Some employing companies have quite changed the habit of irregular work in their hands by giving a bonus to all who work every day in the month, sickness excepted. When the idler observes that the steady worker gets seventy cents for each day, while he who has missed a day gets only sixty-seven cents, and he who has missed two days gets only sixty-four cents — and so on — the practice of taking time off loses its allurement.

Belonging to a people which is very radical as to education, but exceedingly conservative as to the rights of property, these Americans in Mexico, most of them connected with capitalistic interests, exaggerate the role of the school in social progress and underrate the role of economic opportunity, because the latter can be realized only by affronting their ideas of the sacredness of property.

3

As one goes about visiting public elementary schools, the eye lights on much that is depressing. Rooms ill lighted, tiled floor broken and full of holes, bare splotched walls, poor blackboards, no charts or teaching apparatus, three children crowded into old-fashioned seats meant for two, no playgrounds save the diminutive paved patio, from forty to sixty pupils to a teacher, exercises disturbed by noises from the narrow dark street! As I witnessed children cooped up in such cheerless rooms, ruining their eyesight poring over books in the semidarkness, I wondered whether it would not be better to let them play all day out on the hillside in the sun, even though they grew up illiterate. At least, they might grow up strong and well, which they can never do in such quarters.

As one passes from such a school to an American mission school with skylights, bright picture-hung walls, fine blackboards, gay charts, good wooden floors, one desk to a child, and only twenty or thirty children to a teacher it is borne in upon one what a service the missions are rendering in holding before the Mexican masses an example of what a school should be.

Here is a normal school in a state capital. It is housed well enough, for it occupies the cloisters of a former convent. But consider the faculty. Only two or three are teachers by profession. A dozen or more are practising lawyers, doctors, or engineers, each of whom presents his subject for an hour on two or three days in a week. Most of them do not understand the problems of a teacher, have no respect for the teaching profession, and actually sow doubts in the minds of these normalistas as to the value of their chosen calling. Surely this is not the way to form teachers! What is needed is a staff of full-time men — professional educators preferably, but anyhow not practitioners — each of whom will devote himself to teaching his subject.

The pay offered is so meager that the normal school attracts into its faculty only the poorer lawyers and physicians. Moreover, many of the pupils struggle so hard to make their living that they have little energ}^ left for study. How much better it would be if the Federal Government, instead of invading the proper field of the State by planting elementary schools of its own, should use some of its funds in creating scholarships in aid of deser\dng young people who wish to fit themselves for teaching !

Five years ago the big normal school in Mexico City had a faculty of more than sixty, most of them professional men giving each a lecture for from three to five times a week. Only one in four had received professional training in teaching. The school was so unsuited to form teachers that it had to be closed, reorganized, and opened on a new basis. Now, I understand, it is back in the old rut.

Even after the Revolution, in the public schools of Mexico City it was the practice that instead of one teacher ‘s instructing the children in all branches, they came under “specialists” — in drawing, music, handwriting, language, physical education, etc. — each of whom spent only two or three periods a week with them. The result was that the teacher did not come to know her children and hence had no influence on their characters and habits and no contacts with their parents. For a time the specialists were cut out, but I understand that they are back again.

Lest these cases should overmuch discourage, let me tell of the State Industrial School in Queretaro, which is housed in a fine old episcopal palace taken from the church. There are twenty-five in the faculty, which is headed by a lady principal who is a fine speciman of womanhood. There are two hundred and fifty students ranging in age from fourteen to twentyfive. Two thirds come in the day and one third at night. Twenty-one branches of industry are taught — among them cooking, baby-care, telegraphy, sewing, typing, drawn-work, embroidery, etc. When we visited it, between six and seven in the evening, it was a hive of industry. Evening classes had been started only that week. There was considerable objection from the priests and from parents to the young women’s being away from home evenings, but eighty enrolled and that evening every girl was there. An eager, hopeful, forward-looking school!

4

The status of the teacher is far from what it should be. An American who knows the situation thoroughly declares that the Mexican States in the last four years have not paid the teachers their full salaries one quarter of the time. Recently an American in charge of the foreign language instruction in the schools of the Federal District called his three hundred teachers together and told them that he had the legal power to dismiss any one of them without cause or on a false charge and that he was ashamed to be in such a relation to them. He asked them to organize and present him the names of ten teachers who possessed their confidence. He would select five of them and bind himself to drop or discipline no teacher without the approval of this committee. His offer took their breath away, but at once they began to organize.

Most significant is the petition which this newly formed Teachers ‘ League in Mexico City has addressed to the Technical Department of the Secretariat of Education. They ask that no teacher shall be removed save for cause, which cause shall be established before a jury of two fathers of family and three teachers. Knomng what it is to be at the mercy of the school authorities, the teachers demand, also, that no teacher shall be removed, demoted or promoted, fined, threatened, or commended, for belonging or not belonging to a political party, for having been active or inactive for or against a political personage or group, for holding or not holding certain religious beliefs, for practising or not practising the ceremonies of any cult, for having contributed or made a present to any official aspirant, or for having voted.

The aim is emancipation from the political tyranny which now weighs upon them and makes them easy victims of their superiors when these wish to use them for their personal ends. They hope to work under a contract so that in case suspension of pay obliges tliem to cease teaching in order to earn something, their position will be awaiting them when resumption of pay enables them to recommence teaching.

But will this generous effort to rescue teaching from the claws of politics succeed? Will teaching free itself from this unwarranted tuteage, be rid of the sword of Damocles, suspended always over its head in the form of arbitrary demotion, or abrupt dismissal, or shifting to another school? Insiders doubt if this magna charta of teacher rights will find favor with the secretary of education or if the teaching profession will free itself from the hateful political yoke it has borne since the beginning of public schools in Mexico.

Such demands are, at least, a good augury for the future. There is encouragement also in the fact that daughters of former land barons who have come into financial straits are offering themselves in increasing numbers as schoolteachers. This promises not only better teachers but, in time, a higher social status for the teacher.

Those who care most for popular enlightenment wish to see education divorced from politics. At present, education is on the same footing as justice, police, public works, etc. Let it be looked after (they urge) by state boards of education and city boards. Let the state board be constituted of seven members appointed by the governor, holding for seven years, one being appointed each year. The time required to gain a political control of the board will discourage attempts to pack it on behalf of the governor or a party. Let the local board be appointed in like manner by the city council. Make these boards independent financially by levying a certain tax or adding a fixed percentage to the government taxes, the proceeds of which shall be entirely at their disposal.

5

Public secondary education is the polar opposite of anything we are familiar with. Instead of a public “high school” in every town, each of the five state universities has attached to it a “preparatory school,” which fits young people for the university, itself a collection of professional schools. Aside from this there is no general public secondary school but only schools for commerce, agriculture, industry, and teacher training. This, of course, leaves a large place for the numerous Catholic secondary schools. Many who desire a general secondary education but are not within reach of a “preparatory school” attend a normal school, where, of course, they must submit to a professional training they do not intend to use.

Under such a system the proportion of youths who push their education beyond the six years’ elementary school is insig*nificant in comparison with the United States.

From churchmen I heard repeatedly the charge that the preparatory schools are “Positivist,” which puzzled me until I learned that their curriculum was originally based on Auguste Comte’s famous classification of the sciences. Comte held that the order in which the branches of knowledge have been developed historically, viz., mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology, reflects a logical order in which each science depends upon those which have preceded it. The Mexican educators of 1867 drew the conclusion that this order gives the clue as to the order in which the chief branches of knowledge should be presented to the youthful mind.

The results, of course, are dreadfuL The poor lads emerge from the preparatory school at sixteen or thereabouts with their minds in a whirl. Think of children who have never dissected an organism or looked through a microscope or used a test-tube absorbing lectures on the history of each of the sciences !

Experience forced modification of the curriculum in various ways. Concrete studies were added, such as elementary botany, zoology, and anatomy. Language and literature were brought in, then history and geography. A place was made for the fine arts — music, drawing, and painting — and physical training was introduced. Lastly, attention was given to vocational subjects. Still, the Comtean groundwork was kept. Sociology, as crown of the sciences, must not be left out, and so, in 1896, they actually plunged these “prep school ‘^ seniors into Spencer’s “Principles of Sociology,” there being no other text in sight. The experiment failed, of course, and the subject was handed up to the students of law. In 1900 ethics was substituted and, later, civics.

6

Society’s campaign against intellectual darkness is being waged along various lines.

In some States the hacendado is required by law to provide a school-house on his hacienda, and also the salary for a teacher appointed by the State. Elsewhere this is being enforced even without law. On the great cotton-growing plantations in the Laguna district of Coahuila, the planters, judging that the teachers sent them were bunglers, have obtained the privilege of appointing teachers of their own selection.

Among the eight or nine million Indians in Mexico there are said to be two millions who do not know the Spanish language. For the children of these and others out of reach of any school has been created a federal corps of sixty “missionaries,” who go about from place to place instructing the children by day and adults by night. At first they tarried for a mouth, but as this was found too short a time in which to teach people to read, the teim has been extended to three months, so that the missionary visits four places in a year. It is proposed to increase the number of these missionaries to two hundred and fifty.

Following a scheme worked out by a school principal in Guanajuato, the secretary of education has organized a “child army against illiteracy.” The pupils of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades of any school, who volunteer for the “campaign,” are organized into groups of ten under a chief through whom they report to their teacher. The children search out illiterates among persons they know and get them to consent to receive instruction. The child who enrolls one or more illiterates is recognized as an “active soldier” in the army and is sent the materials and instructions for teaching. Once a “soldier” has brought his illiterate to a knowledge of reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic, the pupil is examined and, if found qualified, his name is sent in and credited to the “soldier.” The child who has five illiterates to his credit receives from the secretary of education a diploma certifying him as a ” good Mexican” and will, in the future, enjoy preference in anything with which the Department of Education has to do.

The scheme is cleverly conceived, but is it practical? The best Mexican educators I consulted tell me that adults mil be loath to be taught by children so immature and that, if they do submit themselves to such instruction, the children’s school work will be seriously digturbed. They would attack illiteracy by providing special remnneration for teachers who form evening classes and teach the rudiments to illiterate adults.

Although each of the twenty-eight States of Mexico has its public school system, the Federal Government is establishing elementary schools of its own. Formerly the policy was to create in each state a council of public education of three members, one representing the State, one the town, and one the Department of Education. But such councils are not working well. The federal representative is not always able to prevent the federal moneys from being used otherwise than as the law contemplates. It would be possible, of course, for the Federal Government to give education money to the States, as our Federal Government does, to be expended under restrictions and for purposes prescribed. What is actually being done by the Federal Government, however, is to create elementary schools of its own just as Buenos Aires did in Argentina.

The secretary of education has it in mind to get into virgin territory, to plant his schools only where there is now no public school whatever. He wishes particularly to reach the children of the village and hacienda Indians. The idea is to give much attention to showing these people better agricultural ways than they are familiar with, taking care, however, not to acquaint them with farm implements out of their reach or methods over their heads — which would discourage them. The aim is to show them a type of tillage one step above their present methods. The best plan would be a school in charge of a married couple, the woman making the girls into home-makers, the man converting the boys into cultivators unless some other industry prevails in that locality.

Along with teaching them to read and write and to be useful, there is the task of planting the national idea among tribesmen who have no more idea of their country than they have of Abyssinia. There is talk of sending out traveling lecturers with films showing the scenes and pursuits characteristic of the different climatic regions — so strongly accentuated in Mexico — and exhibiting the various activities of their Government in respect to roads, ports, irrigation, etc. These would be as much for the adults as for children, and the latter, besides, would be gaining in school some knowledge of the great moments and personalities in Mexican history.

Alas, teachers to create rural schools of this practical character do not exist. They are still to be formed in a new type of agricultural normal school not yet established. Several, however, will be in operation next year, and two years later their product will be available. So three years must elapse before the desired type of rural school can be planted in any considerable number.

7

It is as plain as the black and white squares on a checker-board that in Mexico it is the unlettered masses that are famishing for knowledge and that the educator’s first task is to help the millions in the quagxaire grasp the first rung of the educational ladder rather than to succor those already part-way up. However, Senor Vasconcelos, the secretary of education, is not an educator but a la^\yer with literary tastes, and the activities of his department exhibit certain bents of the Latin mind.

Last year the department began publishing for gratuitous distribution to teachers ‘*E1 Maestro” (The Teacher), a handsome monthly “review of national culture.” Naturally you expect that it would give the teacher much light on how to cope with his concrete problems, e.g., how should the school-room be furnished and lighted; equipment of a playground; school sanitation; how to teach writing, physiology, work with the hands, etc. It does nothing of the sort. It has such articles as Plato’s dialogue on Justice, “Antiquity of Man in the Valley of Mexico,” “The Argentine Republic,” “Latifundia,” “Twenty Years of North American Domination in Porto Rico.” It prints historical essays, bits from Tolstoi, Rolland, Shaw, poems, stories, etc. Everything is in the best of taste, but what has this literary monthly to do with school-room problems’? It is as if our commissioner of education should send “The Dial” to every American teacher!

There is a division of libraries in the Department of Education which sends out collections of books for villages, towns, labor-unions, schools, public libraries, etc. The smallest collection is of twelve volumes and includes treatises on arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and agriculture as well as Mexican geography and history. The other three volumes are Mexican poets, the Gospels, and “Don Quixote.” The collection of twenty-five volumes contains, besides, the Iliad, the Greek tragedies, Plato, Arabian Nights, Flowers of St. Francis, Shakespeare, Kousseau’s “Emile,” etc. And so it goes. ‘Way over people’s heads! When the workingmen and the villagers see what has been sent them they sigh and go away sorrowful. Months pass and dust gathers on the books, for no one ever takes them to read.

Then, through the university, Seiior Vasconcelos is bringing out Spanish editions of the world’s best books, so that you shall not need to know a foreign language in order to read them. In introducing the first one, the Iliad, he finely says:

To get the best book into the humblest hand so as to achieve spiritual regeneration is another aim of these editions which, for the most part, will be distributed gratuitously among the hbraries and schools that the government is opening throughout the republic. The spread of these classics is a second phase of the campaign we are developing against illiteracy. For, after teaching to read, we give that which ought to be read, viz., the best that exists, so in the selection of works our criterion has been supreme excellence and the aim of forming a collection embracing, so far as possible, all the noblest aspects of human thought.

So far have been brought out the Iliad, the Odyssey, Plato’s Dialogues, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, and Dante’s “Divina Commedia.” Among the books promised are a summary of Buddhist morals, the Gospels, selected dramas of Shakespere, of Lope de Vega, and of Calderon, some volumes of Hispanic-American and Mexican literature, Sierra’s Universal History, Reclus’s Geography, Faust, Ibsen, Shaw, Galdos, Tolstoy, Eostand, Tagore, and books on the social question.

This is a good deal like presenting a frockcoat to a man who has no shirt. Think of offering the classics to Indians who have just learned to read! Rather let them have books of fables, myths, folk-lore; tales of adventure and travel; stories of the boyhood and exploits of Hidalgo, Morelos, Allende, Juarez, and other national heroes; colorful bits of Mexican history retold in simple language; “Robinson Crusoe,” Franklin’s Autobiography, etc.

What irony to publish the supreme classics when 85 per cent of the Mexican people are of the manual laboring class, without travel, background, or knowledge, and have still to read their first book! It is as if you should install an eight-day clock in the hut of an Indian who cannot tell time. No wonder the real educators sigh when they see how the money is going for “culture” while myriads are growing up in blackest ignorance. I would ask of the state superintendent of public instruction: “Have any new federal schools been opened? Are any more teachers at work?” and the answer would be, “No, we are told that help is coming, but so far none is at hand.”

Latin idealists think they are “democratizing” education when they carry to the children of the masses an ornamental and cultural body of knowledge that was devised for the children of the leisure class. It has never occurred to them that the content of education needs to be democratized. The teaching that will meet the crying needs of the Mexican masses will contain little of historical vistas, or literary titbits, or philosophic outlooks, but mil tell them how to keep well, how to behave, how to treat one ‘s fellows, how to make a living, how to be a good patriot and citizen. To spread before them a repast of cultural delicacies which they will not partake of is like offering a famished peon layer-cake when he craves tortillas and frijoles.

Between the secretary of education, who grasps the processes of education by their tops and fails to visualize the little urchins on a rude bench in a dreary, ill lighted school-room in a far-away village, and the church, which fills a arge part of the time of the pupils in her schools with telling their beads and repeating, line by line after their teacher, the prayers of the rosary, the outlook for the children of the Mexican proletariat soon obtaining intellectual nourishment is not very bright.