other. I imagine that it would require a very long freight train to carry all the flattering literature that was circulated in this country by the friends of Diaz in the six months following the first appearance of my articles upon the news stands.
The perusal of those articles and this other literature also would drive anyone inevitably to the conclusion that somebody was deliberately distorting the truth. Who was distorting the truth? Who — and why? Since the who as well as the why are peculiarly a part of this story I may be pardoned for pausing for a few pages to reply, first, to the question, "Who?"
It would give me pleasure to present here some hundreds of letters which, among them, corroborate many times all the essential features of my account of Mexican slavery. But did I do so there would be little room left in the book for anything else. I can merely say that in most cases the writers claimed to have spent various numbers of years in Mexico. The letters were unsolicited, the writers were paid by no one; in many cases they were endangering their own interests in writing. If I am the liar, all of these persons must be liars, also, a proposition which I doubt if anyone could believe were they to read the letters.
But I am not printing these letters and I do not ask the reader to consider them in my favor. Samples of them, and a large enough number to be convincing, are to be found, however, in the November, December and January numbers of The American Magazine.
I shall pass over, also, the published testimony of other writers, well-known investigators, who have corroborated my story in more or less detail. For example, the account of the slavery of the American rubber plantations, written by Herman Whitaker and printed in
