months later he met her on the street and asked her how she liked her new master. 'Finely,' she answered, 'finely. You see, my master is a very rough man and he beats me nearly every day!'"
The philosophy of beating was made very clear to me by Don Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Camara.
"It is necessary to whip them—oh, yes, very necessary," he told me, with a smile, "for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. What other means is there of enforcing the discipline of the farm? If we did not whip them they would do nothing."
I could make no reply. I could think of no ground upon which to assail Don Felipe's logic. For what, pray, can be done to a chattel slave to make him work but to beat him? With the wage worker you have the fear of discharge or the reduction of wages to hold over his head and make him toe the mark, but the chattel slave would welcome discharge, and as to reducing his food supply, you don't dare to do that or you kill him outright. At least, that is the case in Yucatan.
One of the first sights we saw on a henequen plantation was the beating of a slave—a formal beating before the assembled toilers of the ranch early in the morning just after the daily roll call. The slave was taken on the back of a huge Chinaman and given fifteen lashes across the bare back with a heavy, wet rope, lashes so lustily delivered that the blood ran down the victim's body. This method of beating is an ancient one in Yucatan and is the customary one on all the plantations for boys and all except the heaviest men. Women are required to kneel to be beaten, as sometimes are men of great weight. Men and women are beaten in the fields as well as at the morning roll call. Each foreman, or capataz, carries a heavy cane with which he punches
