Whatever the debt, it takes the market price to get the debtor free again!
Even then, I thought, it would not be so bad if the servant had an opportunity of working out the price and buying back his freedom. Even some of our negro slaves before the Civil War were permitted—by exceptionally lenient masters—to do that.
But I found that such was not the custom. "You need have no fear in purchasing this plantation," said one planter to me, "of the laborers being able to buy their freedom and leave you. They can never do that."
The only man in the country whom I heard of as having ever permitted a slave to buy his freedom was a professional man of Merida, an architect. "I bought a laborer for $1,000," he explained to me. "He was a good man and helped me a lot about my office. After I got to liking him I credited him with so much wages per week. After eight years I owed him the full $1,000, so I let him go. But they never do that on the plantations—never."
Thus I learned that the debt feature of the enforced service does not alleviate the hardships of the slave by making it easier for him to free himself, neither does it affect the conditions of his sale or his complete subjection to his master. On the other hand, I found that the one particular in which this debt element does play an actual part in the destiny of the unfortunate of Yucatan militates against him instead of operating in his favor. For it is by means of debt that the Yucatan slave-driver gets possession of the free laborers of his realm to replenish the overworked and underfed, the overbeaten, the dying slaves of his plantation.
How are the slaves recruited? Don Joaquin Peon informed me that the Maya slaves die off faster than
