Page:Mexico under Carranza.djvu/152

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MEXICO UNDER CARRANZA

ible deposits after three hundred years was very great, and that these deposits were so exhausted everyone familiar with the history of mining in Mexico knows.

Careful study will show the accusation, so often repeated by revolutionists bent upon confiscation, that the Mexican people have been robbed of great mineral wealth by foreigners, to be a pure invention of men desirous of justifying, or palliating, the wrongs they have perpetrated. The net result up to date of the seven years of revolutionary aggression upon the foreign-owned mining investments is that some hundreds of thousands of Mexican labourers, who were earning wages many times greater than they were ever paid by their former Latin-Mexican employers, have been denied the opportunity to make a living, and have been reduced to conditions of misery and suffering almost without a parallel even in the history of their own turbulent country.

FOREIGN INVESTMENTS IN MEXICAN LANDS

Since Mexico became self-governing the agrarian question has been most often assigned as the cause for the political unrest which has formed so large a part of her history. As, previous to the Diaz régime with its enforced law and order, few foreigners had acquired land in Mexico, the complaint against agrarian conditions prior to that