Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/381



Since John Kenneth Turner wrote "Barbarous Mexico" Diaz has fallen, Madero has fallen, and as we go to press with this edition of the book, the "Constitutionalists" under Carranza and Villa in northern Mexico are fighting with considerable success against Huerta, who still holds Mexico City. Until this month President Wilson has resisted the demand of American capitalists that the United States intervene, but the latest dispatches indicate that United States soldiers will soon invade Mexico. The possibility of war with Mexico on behalf of American capitalists makes it more important than ever that American wage-workers understand the facts which Turner has presented in "Barbarous Mexico."

The trouble in Mexico is not mainly due to the acts of Huerta or any other individual. It is due to the fact that the working people of Mexico are held in virtual slavery by the land system against which they are rebelling. In Mexico there is little machinery as yet, and land ownership is the chief means of exploitation. So the slogan of the Mexican rebels is "Land and Liberty."

From the confused bits of information which trickle through the battle lines, it seems that here and there, in the territory occupied by the rebel armies, the peons are beginning to work for themselves without paying tribute to landlords. Will American workers allow the American army to be used to force these rebels back into slavery? April, 1914.