were controlled by small groups of capitalists who lent large sums of money to their friends and rendered small land holders helpless.[1]
The labor needed in railroad construction, mining and factories was recruited from the dispossessed and surplus supply of peons. Sometimes they were collected and driven en masse by mounted men to the seat of enterprise, but more and more they came voluntarily, for they were leaving the estates and wandering about the country in search of work. The wages for industrial laborers, though very low, were higher than for agricultural workers, but they were forced to live and work under conditions of extreme poverty and filth. Workers in the large cities were particularly wretched, as there rents were relatively high and food as costly as in the United States. The death rate in Mexico City from 1895 to 1912 ranged from 42 to 50 per thousand, two or three times as high as in the cities of the United States and Europe, and comparable only to a few of those in the orient.[2]
The political machinery of government, though nominally based upon the constitution of 1857, was in reality a dictatorsihp by Diaz and a bureaucracy headed by the cientificos. Through thoroughly subsidized courts and an efficient system of secret police, freedom of press and public utterance was rendered non-existent and even private criticism of the government, dangerous. Political agitation was prevented by imprisonment or death of leaders. Law and order was maintained by 3,000 rurales, one of the best drilled and most highly paid constabularies in the world, and a federal army of 25,000 or 30,000 men in reserve. Mexico City was said to be the "safest city" in the world. Public instruction was
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