the peon to his master. Debts are handed from father to son and on down through the generations. Though the constitution does not recognize the right of the creditor to take and hold the body of the debtor, the rural authorities everywhere recognize such a right and the result is that probably 5,000,000 people, or one-third the entire population, are today living in a state of helpless peonage.
Farm peons are often credited with receiving wages, which nominally range from twelve and one-half cents a day to twenty-five cents a day, American money—seldom higher. Often they never receive a cent of this, but are paid only in credit checks at the hacienda store, at which they are compelled to trade in spite of the exorbitant prices. As a result their food consists solely of corn and beans, they live in hovels often made of no more substantial material than corn-stalks, and they wear their pitiful clothing, not merely until the garments are all rags and patches and ready to drop off, but until they actually do attain the vanishing act.
Probably not fewer than eighty per cent of all the farm and plantation laborers in Mexico are either slaves or are bound to the land as peons. The other twenty per cent are denominated as free laborers and live a precarious existence trying to dodge the net of those who would drag them down. I remember particularly a family of such whom I met in the State of Chihuahua. They were typical, though my memory of them is most vivid because I saw them on the first night I ever spent in Mexico. It was in a second-class car on the Mexican Central, traveling south.
They were six, that family, and of three generations. From the callow, raven-haired boy to the white-chinned grandfather, all six seemed to have the last ray of mirth ground out of their systems. We were a lively
