Page:Mexico and its reconstruction.djvu/136

118. There were year, two-year, and even five-year contracts. There were share farmers of various kinds and casual laborers. The longer contracts might or might not involve such elements as ration, the furnishing of tools, clothes, medicine, housing, and a large number of other elements. To speak of Mexican peonage as a system was to use a misnomer. Nothing less deserved the name. It was a tissue of widely varying rules partly resting on state legislation but largely on local custom, the origin of which was not found in written law even in the colonial régime.

Study of wage rates, though they are carefully reported in the inquiry referred to, does not allow definite conclusions. Actual income in one district as compared to another was not measured by the money wage. Ration allowances, land for the peon's use, and hunting privileges modified conditions. A centavo had a very different value in Chiapas from that which it possessed in Durango, the wants of the peon in the one case were fewer than in the second and he would stop working sooner, no matter what the wage offered.

It is also impossible to give any intelligent discussion of the hours of labor in a country where presence on the job has such an indefinite relation to the work done. This is true in all non-industrial countries in which there are wide variations of climatic conditions. The peon started work in many districts at four in the morning. He finished at eight at night or later. The working hours were variously reported within the 16-hour period. Yet the number of Mexican laborers who worked straight through the reported working period or straight