days or weeks later the observer will see it at Progreso, the port of Yucatan, twenty-five miles north of Merida, being loaded into a steamship flying the British flag. The United States buys nearly all the henequen of Yucatan, our cordage trust, an alleged concern of Standard Oil, absorbing more than half of the entire product.
Eight centavos per pound was the 1908 price received for sisal hemp in the bale. One slave dealer told me that the production cost no more than one.
About the machinery we found many small boys working. In the drying yard we found boys and men. All of the latter impressed me with their listless movements and their haggard, feverish faces. This was explained by the foreman in charge. "When the men are sick we let them work here," he said—"on half pay!"
Such was the men's hospital. The hospital for the women we discovered in a basement of one of the main buildings. It was simply a row of windowless, earthen floor rooms, half-dungeons, in each of which lay one woman on a bare board, without a blanket to soften it.
More than three hundred of the able-bodied slaves spend the nights in a large structure of stone and mortar, surrounded by a solid wall twelve feet high, which is topped with the sharp edges of thousands of broken glass bottles. To this inclosure there is but one door, and at it stands a guard armed with a club, a sword and a pistol. These are the quarters of the unmarried men of the plantation, Mayas, Yaquis and Chinese; also of the "half-timers," slaves whom the plantation uses only about half of the year, married men. some of them, whose families live in little settlements bordering on the farm.
These "half-timers" are found on only about one third of the plantations, and they are a class which has
