Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/15



THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN

What is Mexico?

Americans commonly characterize Mexico as "Our Sister Republic." Most of us picture her vaguely as a republic in reality much like our own, inhabited by people a little different in temperament, a little poorer and a little less advanced, but still enjoying the protection of republican laws—a free people in the sense that we are free.

Others of us, who have seen the country through a car window, or speculated a little in Mexican mines or Mexican plantations, paint that country beyond the Rio Grande as a benevolent paternalism in which a great and good man orders all things well for his foolish but adoring people.

I found Mexico to be neither of these things. The real Mexico I found to be a country with a written constitution and written laws in general almost as fair and democratic as our own, but with neither constitution nor laws in operation. Mexico is a country without political freedom, without freedom of speech, without a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury system, without political parties, without any of our cherished guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a land where there has been no contest