Page:Mexico and its reconstruction.djvu/175

Rh The remedies adopted to eliminate the prevalent abuses are not above question. It is impossible to return the destroyed ejidos to their original owners, and to give them to their landless descendants, even when these can be discovered, is not a step that promises to solve the land problem. The measures for taking over land from the larger estates and dividing it among the peons are also too simple to inspire confidence. The fact is the land problem in Mexico is much more complicated than the revolutionary reformers seem to have conceived it. It is a psychological problem more than a physical one. The land hunger of the peasant does not now need to be satisfied, it needs to be created.

There are large areas in Mexico in which the price of land is still ridiculously low. The landowners complain of a lack of labor supply and many of them would welcome an opportunity to sell small holdings in order to get the laborers fixed in their neighborhoods. Such men could be counted on to furnish an auxiliary labor supply when their time was not demanded by their own properties.

It must be remembered too that most of the large landholdings are in regions unsuited to small ownership. In such areas the "forty acres and a mule" standard of property endowment, which was talked of in the United States for the Southern negro at the end of the Civil War, would be no measure of blessing to a peon. It would mean starvation for both the animal and his owner. In some of the regions, where large properties lie. Irrigation might make small ownership practicable. But, unfortunately for Mexico, irrigation developments