the induced labor system as an economic instrument has many defenders among employers of both Mexican and non-Mexican nationality, there can be no doubt that it lent itself to serious abuse, and that it encouraged the defects with which the laborer was charged. The wrongs committed are not confined to any single region. The better class hacendados, as a whole, themselves deplored the labor conditions, which they apparently took no determined steps to remedy.
The arguments of the defenders of peonage do not convince any large percentage of those who have observed the practices it developed. They are the same as those used in the United States before the Civil War to defend negro slavery. No social institution is entitled to be judged by what it might be if human nature were other than we find it or by the beneficent results obtained under it in isolated cases. Peonage is a survival in Mexico and an unwholesome one. Even if, as its defenders insist, its abolition will bring a slower rate of economic development than would otherwise be possible, there are nevertheless few in the more enlightened countries of the world who will hesitate to declare in favor of its abolition. No nation can afford to sacrifice the individual liberties of its people to secure greater economic advantage. Unfree service is a contradiction in the twentieth century and no effort to bring it to an end can fail to have the sympathy of those who hope to see the growth of true self-government among the nations of the world.
