general estimate as to whether they were higher or lower than those paid before. Striking contradictions present themselves on every side. Wages—nominal wages—in some parts of the country remained stationary for months in the face of a rapidly depreciating currency. In such cases, of course, the laborer, since the nominal cost of living went steadily up, received less and less. As one employer in the Puebla district has declared: "the men kept on working for months when a week's wages would not have bought them a bowl of beans." When the readjustment to the depreciated currency came, there had occurred also such an unsettling of prices that nothing can be stated as to the actual effect on the economic status of the laboring classes.
In this and other regions, when the local peasantry refused to continue work on the plantations at the old rates, the employers who were able to keep control of their property and keep it going had to raise the wages several hundred fold, in many cases so much as to constitute a real as well as a nominal increase.
In still other areas the laboring classes, or those who claimed to represent them, having secured control of the government, were able to profit by the peculiar circumstances of the local industry and to demand extortionate prices for whatever labor they performed. The best example of this condition was found in Yucatan. The spectacular rise in the price of sisal, due to the conditions created by the World War, and the exploitation of the hacendados by the revolutionary government put the agricultural laborers in a position to demand wages comparable to those paid before the war in highly
