ing to the "Mexican Financier" of recent date, "the wages of farm-laborers on the central table-lands of Mexico range from eighteen to twenty-three cents per day, and in the hot-country States, and on the coast, where labor is not so plentiful, the rates average from thirty-seven to fifty cents per day." Agricultural laborers in the district of San Blas average nineteen cents per day, with an allowance of sixteen pounds of corn per week. On a hacienda near Regla, in Central Mexico,
zation about it now than there was three hundred years ago. Each Indian works for himself and sells when he wants money. Up from the hot country he passes to the city, traversing fifty and sixty miles a day, with a back-load of chickens, baskets, poultry, wooden bowls, or other salable stuff. Often the whole family make the trip and camp out on the flags of the plaza or market-house, guarding little piles of fruit or vegetables—beans, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, radishes, beans, beets, potatoes, or squashes—until the load has been disposed of. It will be seen that the city is thus dependent on the caprices of the Indian venders. If the people who raise potatoes or carrots do not happen to be in crying need of funds, it sometimes happens that there is a raging scarcity of those or other articles. There is no thrift or forehandedness about these Indians, and the half-dollar more or less that represents the sum total of a venture of this kind is squandered with reckless rapidity. The prospector of mining days wanted few provisions and much whisky, and the peon adopts the same thoughtless and wanton policy—a little cloth and much pulque. The results are seen even in the very articles he barters. The stock has not been cultivated, and his vegetables are often withered and small and 'run out.' A first-class market-garden in the hot country would be a boon to this city, but when it comes the peons will probably assert the 'rights of labor' against such a wholesale aggression of greedy capital, and they are not likely to do it anymore brutally than have the strikers of countries that boast their higher civilization."—Correspondence of "Springfield Republican."
