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138 pure Indian blood, he was most sympathetic with the peon class and because, being an honest man and a patriot, he made an honest effort to carry out the promises he had made to redress unfavourable agrarian conditions. But his tenure of office, and life, ended soon after the beginning of this effort to establish conditions more just to the masses, and the beneficiaries of his distribution of lands being unable to hold them against the machinations of the governing Latin element, Juarez's efforts to readjust agrarian conditions met with the same ultimate failure that had followed the few other attempts to put the masses of the people into possession of some of the lands.

When Diaz succeeded to power there was no very marked change in the ownership of large real-estate holdings, but it appears that shortly after his accession a number of the revolutionary leaders under him became owners of extensive tracts of land, and the acquisition of some of these from the public domain was probably facilitated by the government. However, these changes in ownership, like others that had been made as the result of various triumphant revolutions, did not work any improvement in agrarian conditions for the peon masses, because the new owners still represented the governing Latin element and held the land in large tracts.

During the three hundred years of Spanish