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130 exception squandered their earnings in the most improvident manner.

An engineer formerly employed by the Mexican government reports that labor conditions in Tamaulipas were practically the same in 1910 as they were a generation before. The money wage had risen to from six to nine pesos a month but the historic system controlled the labor contract. The laborer could not leave until he paid his debt. Once in debt, he could only with great difficulty get out and, if not in debt, he could only with great difficulty remain so. Peons were given a credit account which, on account of advances usually made at the beginning of the contract, always showed a debit balance. They sometimes received the right to live in a house owned by the employer, sometimes they built their own bush shacks. If they were ambitious, they could regularly have land for a garden, but they seldom did so.

These illustrations for both the earlier and the later period of the Diaz régime are samples of widely varying practices in which there was an underlying similarity in that the contracts were not free will engagements. In this sense they are typical of the conditions under which a large part of the laboring population worked. They are not typical in other respects, because the labor contract in different parts of the country and even within the same region was of such varied character that there was no type.

Though peonage was found in widely separated parts of Mexico, both at the beginning and at the end of the Diaz régime, it is a mistake to consider it to have involved all the population at either period. A