was involved in the system, and the peons, or peasantry, were but a degree more fortunately placed.
The words "slave" and "slavery" were not used, unless privately, by the Mexican slave-owners. Other and more convenient terms there were wherewith to designate the system. By a juggling with words and legal forms, they can keep to a certain extent within the letter of their elastic laws. Deportation as practised on the Yaqui Indians of Sonora is a legal proceeding, which fills the Yucatan peninsula with slaves, so completely the property of their masters, that they may be bought and sold, starved, beaten, treated with inhuman barbarity, and killed outright when they have ceased to be of value to these masters. Equally effectual for the procuring of slaves are the "legal" systems of contract labour and enforced service for debt. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, is the labourer more harshly repressed, more pitiably abject, than in Mexico; and it is an easy matter for the labour agent to inveigle him into signing a contract, fair enough at the first glance, in reality a bond of slavery. Once in the power of the slave-owners (the hennequen farmers of Yucatan, the owners of the great plantations of rubber, coffee, tobacco, and sugar-cane, in the Southern States), the labourer gets few wages or perhaps none. In lieu, a cheque is given him wherewith to purchase his requirements on the plantation. Nothing easier, therefore, than that he should fall into debt to his master, and a debt so incurred is seldom or never liquidated. The owner does not "sell" his slave; he simply transfers the debt and with it the compulsory services of his human property. But the shallowness of this pretence is shown by the fact that the "debt" is a fixed and invariable amount—or, rather, an amount which varies with the price of labour, and not with the circumstances of the particular case. When the supply of contract labour failed, kidnapping and other means of procuring slaves were resorted to, and the mask of legality thrown aside.
This disgraceful traffic in human lives was not only tolerated
