Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/258

226 taken from confinement to haciendas and on the Yaquis. *** I am interested in a large plantation in southern Mexico, where we have some 300 Yaqui laborers.

"Throughout the Yaqui country I have seen such things as are pictured in the magazine, passed the bodies of men hanging to trees, sometimes mutilated; have seen hundreds of tame Yaquis herded in jails to be sent to the plantations of Yucatan, or Tabasco, or Veracruz; have heard of worse things.

"There is a certain sort of peonage in Mexico. One may call it slavery if he will, and not be far from the truth. It is, in fact, illegal, and no contracts under it can be enforced in the courts. The slave is a slave so long as he is working out his debt."

Of course none of the defenders of Mexico admit all of my assertions, and all of them, naturally, seek to minimize the horrors of the slave system—otherwise they could not be defending it. But you will see that one admits one thing and another another until the whole story is confessed as true.

Among the American publishers who rushed to the defense of Diaz was Mr. William Randolph Hearst. Mr. Hearst sent a writer, Otheman Stevens, to Mexico to gather material to prove that Mexico is not barbarous. Valiantly did Mr. Stevens attempt to carry out his trust, but in dealing with the contract slavery system he succeeded in admitting most of the essential points, and was able to defend only on the plea of capitalistic "necessity." Some of his admissions, as they appeared in the Cosmopolitan Magazine of March, 1910, are:

"To offset these prospects of early industrial advances is the contract labor system, and the contract labor system in Mexico is a bad institution.

"Its repulsive features to our eyes is the fact that, while the laborer enters voluntarily into the contract, the law gives the employer a right over the workman's person in the enforcement of the contract. Theoretically, there is no argument to be made for contract labor.