Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/276

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
244
BARBAROUS MEXICO

of the incident was—and my authority is most reliable—that the slave had run away, was caught by a planter other than his owner, who attempted to hold him quietly as his own. In the course of the day's work the slave was badly beaten, and it was in this condition that his real owner found him. The real owner secured the arrest of the would-be thief, in the name of the slave, and so the story of the "equality before the law" of the slave and master went out to the world.

The important thing, however, is not the laughable mistakes of Mr. Hearst's writers, but the wherefore of Mr. Hearst's putting his printing presses so unreservedly into the service of a man and a system such as he would not defend for a moment were they to be found in any other country.

But let us mention a few more publications which have put themselves in the same class as Mr. Hearst's magazine. There is Sunset Magazine. In February, 1910, it began a series of articles by “Gasper Estrada Gonzalez," who is announced as "a stateman who is very close to Diaz." There were three articles of fawning flattery. Followed an article by Herman Whitaker, in which he praised Diaz to the skies and absolved him from all blame for the slave atrocities of Mexico. Then came an article by a man named Murray, who wrote to justify Diaz's extermination of the Yaquis.

Moody's Magazine ran a series of articles under the title, "Mexico as it Is," in which the writer attempted to neutralize the effect of "Barbarous Mexico" upon the public conscience. I have already mentioned defenses which were published in the Bankers' Magazine and in the Mining World. In addition, The Overland Monthly, The Exporter, many newspapers—like the Los Angeles