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222 The American Magazine for February, 1910; the accounts of the slavery of Yucatan by the English writers, Arnold and Frost, in the book, "An American Egypt," which was quoted at length in The American Magazine of April, 1910. The corroboration which I shall present here is taken almost entirely from my critics themselves persons who started out to deny the slavery or to palliate it, and who ended by admitting the existence of the essential features of that institution.

To begin with the least important class of witnesses, I shall take up first the statements of several American planters who rushed into print to defend the system of their friend Diaz. There is George S. Gould, manager of the San Gabriel rubber plantation, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In various newspapers Mr. Gould was quoted extensively, especially in the San Francisco Bulletin, where he speaks of the "absolute inaccuracy" of my writings. Here are some of his explanations taken from that paper:

"As general manager of the San Gabriel, I send $2,500 at a certain season to my agent in the City of Oaxaca. He opens an employment office and calls for a quota of seventy-five men. ***

"The laborer is given an average of fifty cents (Mexican) a week until the debt he owes the company is liquidated. The company is not obliged to pay him this amount, but does so to keep him contented. He is usually contracted for for periods ranging from six months to three years. In three years, if he is reasonably industrious and saving, he will not only have paid off his debt money, but he will draw his liquidation with money in his pocket. ***

“The sum total is this: The peon slavery in Mexico might be called slavery in the strictest sense of the word, but as long as the laborer is under contract to the plantation owner he is being done an inestimable good. It is the plantation owners who prevent the peon—ordinarily worthless humans with no profession—from becoming public charges. Unwittingly perhaps