they batted me a few times with a stick, but Ah wouldn't a let 'em beat me; no suh, not me!"
The plantation that caught Tom West, Kentuckian, was an American plantation. Some months after talking with Tom I happened to hold a conversation with a man who identified himself as Tom's master after I had told him Tom's story.
"Those niggers," this American told me, "were an experiment that didn't turn out very well. They must have been ours, for I don't know of anybody else down that way that had them at the time of which you speak. The seven and a half a day? Oh, the agents told 'em anything to get them. That was none of our business. We simply bought them and paid for them and then made them work out their purchase price before we gave them any money. Yes, we kept them under lock and key at night and had to guard them with guns in the daytime. When they tried to make a break we'd tie 'em up and give 'em a good dressing down with a club. The authorities? We chummed with the authorities. They were our friends."
The partnership of American capital with President Diaz not only puts at its disposal a system of slave labor, but also permits it to utilize the system of peonage and to beat the class of wage-laborers down to the lowest point of subsistence. Where slavery does not exist in Mexico you find peonage, a mild form of slavery, or you find cheap wage-labor. Diaz's rurales shot Colonel Greene's copper miners into submission and threats of imprisonment put an end to the great strike on an American-Mexican railroad. American capitalists boast of the fact that their Diaz "does not permit any foolishness on the part of these labor unions." In such facts as
