get away. So we put our wages together and used our last dollar to pay for tickets to Torreon, where we hope to find work in the cotton fields. I hear we can get one peso a day in busy times. Is it so? Or will it be the same story over again there? Perhaps it will. But what else can I do but try? Work! work! work! That's all there is for us—and nothing in return for the work! We do not drink; we are not lazy; every day we pray to God. Yet debt is always following us, begging to be taken in. Many times I have wanted to borrow just a little from my boss, but my wife has always pleaded with me. 'No,' she would say, 'better die than to owe, for owing once means owing forever—and slavery.'
"But sometimes," continued the old man, "I think it might be better to owe, better to fall in debt, better to give up our liberty than to go on like this to the end. True, I am getting old and I would love to die free, but it is hard—too hard!"
The three-quarters of a million of chattel slaves and the five million peons do not monopolize the economic misery of Mexico. It extends to every class of men that toils. There are 150,000 mine and smelter workers who receive less money for a week's labor than an American miner of the same class gets for a day's wages. There are 30,000 cotton mill operatives whose wages average less than thirty cents a day in American money. There are a quarter of a million domestic servants whose wages range from one to five dollars a month. There are 40,000 impressed soldiers who get less than two dollars a month above the scantiest rations. The common policemen, of Mexico City, 2,000 of them, are paid but fifty cents a day in our money. Fifty cents a day is a high average for street-car conductors in the metropolis, where wages are higher than in any other section of the coun-
