BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

198 BARBAROUS MEXICO
most modern cotton manufactory in the world, but that
it pays the richest profits oil investment.
Certainly the factory is a big one. We saw it—Dc
Lara and I—from A to Z, following the raw cotton from
the cleaner through all its various processes and treatments
until it finally came out neatly folded in fancy
prints or specially colored weaves. We even descended
five iron ladders down into the bowels of the earth, saw
the great pin and caught a glimpse of the swirling black
waters which turn every wheel in the mill. And we
observed the workers, too, men, women and children.
They were Mexicans with hardly an exception. The
men, in the mass, are paid thirty-seven and one-half
cents a day in our money, the women from one dollar
and a half to two dollars a week, the children, who range
down to seven and eight, from ten to twenty-five cents
a day. These figures were given us by an officer of the
mill who showed us about, and they were confirmed in
talks with the workers themselves.
Thirteen hours a day—from 6 until 8—are long for
labor in the open air and sunshine, but thirteen hours
in that roar of machinery, in that lint-laden air, in those
poisonous dye rooms—how very long that must be! The
terrible smell of the dye rooms nauseated me and I had
to hurry on. The dye rooms are a suicide hole for the
men who work there, for it is said that they survive, on
an average, only a twelve-month. Yet the company finds
that plenty of them are willing to commit the suicide
for the additional inducement of seven and one-half
cents a day over the regular wage.
The Rio Blanco mill was established sixteen years ago
—sixteen years, but in their history, the mill and the
town have just two epochs—before the strike and after
the strike. Wherever we went about Rio Blanco and