CHAPTER XII
CRITICS AND CORROBORATION
The first five chapters of this book, which, in a little less extended form, were published serially in The American Magazine in the fall of 1909, called forth a considerable measure of comment both in the United States and Mexico. Both the magazine and myself were deluged with letters, many of which asserted that the writers themselves had witnessed conditions similar to those which I described. On the other hand, there were many who flatly averred that I was a fabricator and a slanderer, declaring, variously, that nothing akin to slavery or even to peonage existed in Mexico, that, if it did, it was the only practical way to civilize Mexico, anyhow, that the Mexican working people were the happiest and most fortunate on the face of the earth, that President Diaz was the most benign ruler of the age, that a long enough hunt would discover cases of barbarities even in the United States, and we would better clean our own house first, that there were $900,000,000 of American capital invested in Mexico—and so on and so on.
The remarkable thing, indeed, about the discussion was the headlong manner in which certain magazines, newspapers, book publishers and private individuals in this country rushed to the defense of President Diaz. These individuals evidently acted on the theory that a charge of slavery in his domain was an aspersion on the rule of President Diaz, and quite correctly so. Wherefore, they proceeded to denounce me in the most vigorous terms, on the one hand, and to let loose a flood of adulatory literature concerning President Diaz, on the
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