Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/238

222 Aztecs and Tezcocans had spread until it existed in a greater or less degree throughout all the country which we now know as Mexico.

That people of the character of the native races of Mexico as described by historians should now be represented after four hundred years by those whom travellers know as the ignorant and often brutalized peons, would seem incredible were it not that the world has had such terrible and pitiful examples of the power of injustice, wrong, and oppression to produce racial disintegration and degradation. It is an historical fact known to students of sociology that the servitude most destructive of the physical, moral, and intellectual qualities of its victims is economic and industrial rather than chattel. It has been often said that the chattel slave finds protection in the fact that he stands as the representative of a certain amount of property or wealth to his master, while the economic slave represents to his employer, if he be unrestrained by the prickings of conscience, only the labour that can be obtained from him. As illustrating this, it may be said that probably no owner of chattel slaves ever treated them so harshly as some mill owners of England who chained children to spinning and weaving machines, so that they could not flee from the torment of their occupation, before England became wise enough to protect her people from such conscienceless exploitation.