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BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

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BARBAROUS MEXICO<br />

CHAPTER I<br />

THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN<br />

What is Mexico?<br />

Americans commonly characterize Mexico as "Our<br />

Sister Republic." Most of us picture her vaguely as<br />

a republic in reality much like our own, inhabited by<br />

people a little different in temperament, a little poorer<br />

and a little less advanced, but still enjoying the protection<br />

of republican laws—a free people in the sense that<br />

we are free.<br />

Others of us, who have seen the country through a<br />

car window, or speculated a little in Mexican mines<br />

or Mexican plantations, paint that country beyond the<br />

Rio Grande as a benevolent paternalism in which a<br />

great and good man orders all things well for his foolish<br />

but adoring people.<br />

I found Mexico to he neither of these things. The<br />

real Mexico I found to be a country with a written<br />

constitution and written laws in general almost as fair<br />

and democratic as our own, but with neither constitution<br />

nor laws in operation. Mexico is a country without<br />

political freedom, without freedom of speech, without<br />

a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury system,<br />

without political parties, without any of our cherished<br />

guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of<br />

happiness. It is a land where there has been no contest<br />

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