BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 111
the peon to his master. Debts are handed from father to
son and on down through the generations. Though the
constitution does not recognize the right of the creditor to
take and hold the body of the debtor, the rural authorities
everywhere recognize such a right and the result is that
probably 5,000.000 people, or one-third the entire population,
are today living in a state of helpless peonage.
Farm peons are often credited with receiving wages,
which nominally range from twelve and one-half cents a
day to twenty-five cents a day, American money—seldom
higher. Often they never receive a cent of this, but are
paid only in credit checks at the hacienda store, at which
they are compelled to trade in spite of the exorbitant
prices. As a result their food consists solely of corn
and beans, they live in hovels often made of no more
substantial material than corn-stalks, and they wear their
pitiful clothing, not merely until the garments are all rags
and patches and ready to drop off, but until they actually
do attain the vanishing act.
Probably not fewer than eighty per cent of all the farm
and plantation laborers in Mexico are either slaves or
are bound to the land as peons. The other twenty per cent
are denominated as free laborers and live a precarious
existence trying to dodge the net of those who would drag
them down. I remember particularly a family of such
whom I met in the State of Chihuahua. They were
typical, though my memory of them is most vivid because
I saw them on the first night I ever spent in Mexico. It
was in a second-class car on the Mexican Central, traveling
south.
They were six, that family, and of three generations.
From the callow, raven-haired boy to the white-chinned
grandfather, all six seemed to have the last ray of
mirth ground out of their systems. We were a lively