John Kenneth Turner

“ The Yucatan slave gets no hour for lunch, as does the American ranch hand. He goes to the field in the morning twilight, eating his lump of sour dough on the way. He picks up his machete and attacks the first thorny leaf as soon as it is light enough to see the thorns and he never lays down that machete until the twilight of the evening. Two thousand of the big green leaves a day is his "stint," and besides cutting, trimming and piling them, he must count them, and he must count the number of leaves on each plant and be sure that he does not count too many nor too few. ”

“ Mexico is a country without political freedom, without freedom of speech, without a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury system, without political parties, without any of our cherished guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”

“ General Porfirio Diaz, the "greatest living peace-maker," "prince of peace!" It is a sacrilege!
That the Mexican dictator has not fallen a victim to the physical debaucheries that sometimes over-tempt men suddenly risen to great power is undoubtedly true. But what of it? Certainly no one will argue that, since a man keeps clean physically, he has a right to misgovern a country and assassinate a people. Personal cleanliness, physical temperance and marital virtue do not in the least determine the standing a man deserves as a statesman. ”

“ A man may have committed grave crimes, yet if he has brought more joy to the world than sorrow, he should be judged kindly. On the other hand, he may be credited with laudable deeds, yet if he has locked the wheels of progress for a time to feed his own ambition, history will not acquit him of the crime. It is the balance that counts; it is the scales that decide. Will not Porfirio Diaz, when weighed in the balance of his good and evil deeds, be found wanting—terribly wanting? ”

“ And to this end false reports of outrages upon Americans, or danger to American women and children, will be deliberately circulated in order to arouse the nation to justify the crime of invasion. That will be the time for decent Americans to make their voices heard. They will expose, in no uncertain terms, the conspiracy against democracy and demand that, for all time, our government cease putting the machinery of state at the disposal of the despot to help him crush the movement for the abolition of slavery in Mexico. ”

“ Are the American people as enslaved in spirit as the Mexicans are in body? In Mexico the only protest possible is a protest of arms. In the United States there is still a degree of freedom of press and speech. Though by tricks and deceits innumerable the rulers of America succeed in evading the will of the majority, the majority yet may protest, and if the protest be long enough and loud enough, it is still capable of making those rulers tremble. ”

“ In Mexico there are some public schools in the cities and almost none in the country districts. But even if they were there, can a hungry baby learn to read and write? What promise does study hold out for a youth born to shoulder a debt of his father and carry it on to the end of his days?
And they say the Mexican is happy! "As happy as a peon," has come to be a common expression. Can a starving man be happy? Is there any people on earth—any beast of the field, even—so peculiar of nature that it loves cold better than warmth, an empty stomach better than a full one? ”

“ The Yaqui woman feels as keenly the brutal snatching away of her babe as would the cultivated American woman. The heart-strings of the Yaqui wife are no more proof against a violent and unwished-for separation from her husband than would be the heart-strings of the refined mistress of a beautiful American home.
The Mexican government forbids divorce and remarriage within its domain, but for the henequen planters of Yucatan all things are possible. ”

“ I say the "system of Diaz" rather than Diaz personally because, though he is the keystone of the arch, though he is the government of Mexico more completely than is any other individual the government of any large country on the planet, yet no one man can stand alone in his iniquity. Diaz is the central prop of the slavery, but there are other props without which the system could not continue upright for a single day. ”

“ Why do citizens of the United States, who profess a reverence for the principles for which their forefathers of '76 fought, who claim to revere Abraham Lincoln most of all for his Emancipation Proclamation, who shudder at the labor-baiting of the Congo, at the horrors of Russia's Siberia, at the political system of Czar Nicholas, apologize for and defend a more cruel slavery, a worse political oppression, a more complete and terrible despotism—in Mexico? ”

“ Finally, there is nothing that succeeds like success, and Diaz has succeeded. Power dazzles the strong as well as the weak and Diaz's power has dazzled men and cowed them until they had not the courage to look steadily at the glare long enough to see the bones and carrion behind it. I do not for a minute imagine that any decent American approves of the acts of Porfirio Diaz. ”

“ The truth is that the Mexican is a human being and that he is subject to the same evolutionary laws of growth as are potent in the development of any other people. The truth is that, if the Mexican does not fully measure up to the standard of the highest type of European, it is because of his history, a most influential part of which is the grinding exploitation to which he is subjected under the present regime in Mexico. Let us go back to the beginning and glance briefly at the Mexican as an ethnological being and compare his abilities and possibilities with that of the "free" American. ”

“ To be wholly fair to Diaz and his system, I must confess that I am not judging Mexico from the viewpoint of the American investor. I am estimating it from its effects upon the mass of Mexicans generally, who, in the end, must surely determine the destiny of Mexico. From the viewpoint of the common Mexican the government is wholly the opposite of beneficent; it is a slave-driver, a thief, a murderer; it has neither justice nor mercy—nothing but exploitation. ”

“ It is a land where there has been no contest for the office of president for more than a generation, where the executive rules all things by means of a standing army, where political offices are sold for a fixed price. I found Mexico to be a land where the people are poor because they have no rights, where peonage is the rule for the great mass, and where actual chattel slavery obtains for hundreds of thousands. ”

“ Wonderful Mexican gardens! A wonderful fairyland conjured out of slavery—slavery of Mayas, and of Yaquis. Among the Yucatan slaves there are ten Mayas to one Yaqui, but of the two the story of the Yaquis appealed to me the more. The Mayas are dying in their own land and with their own people. The Yaquis are exiles. They are dying in a strange land, they are dying faster, and they are dying alone, away from their families, for every Yaqui family sent to Yucatan is broken up on the way. Husbands and wives are torn apart and babes are taken from their mothers' breasts. ”

“ He has kept the peace—if it can be called keeping the peace—by killing off his opponents as fast as their heads have appeared above the horizon. This sort of peace is what the Mexican writer DeZayas calls "mechanical peace." It has no virtue, because the fruits of legitimate peace fail to ripen under it. It neither brings happiness to the nation, nor prepares the nation for happiness. It prepares it only for violent revolution.
For more than twenty years before arriving at the supreme power in Mexico Diaz had been a professional soldier and almost continually in the field. ”

“ Into this arrangement of things are impressed not only the natives of the various slave states, but others—100,000 others every year, to speak in round numbers—who, either enticed by the false promises of labor agents, kidnapped by labor agents or shipped by political authorities in partnership with labor agents, leave their homes in other parts of the country to journey to their death in the hot lands.
Debt and contract slavery is the prevailing system of production all over the south of Mexico. Probably three-quarters of a million souls may properly be classed as human chattels. ”

“ Is Diaz patriotic? Has he the welfare of Mexico at heart? The flatterers of Diaz swear by his patriotism, but the facts demand a negative answer. Diaz helped depose the foreign prince, but immediately afterwards he plunged a peaceful country into war to feed his own ambition. Perhaps it will be said that Diaz imagined that he could order the destinies of Mexico more for the benefit of Mexico than could anyone else. Doubtless, but why has he not given his country progress? Is it possible that he believes that autocracy is better for a people than democracy? ”

“ A legal enforcement of a contract by using physical force over the person is in itself wrong. On the other hand, legislation now prohibiting contract labor would work a greater wrong, for it would destroy millions of investments, would retard a most beneficent and rapid development of the richest region on this continent, if not in the world, and would, by reflexes, work more harm to the very people it would intend to aid than an indefinite continuance of the present conditions. ”

“ American capital is not at present in favor of political annexation of Mexico. This is because the slavery by which it profits can be maintained with greater safety under the Mexican flag than under the American flag. As long as Mexico can be controlled—in other words, as long as she can be held as a slave colony—she will not be annexed, for once she is annexed the protest of the American people will become so great that the slavery must of necessity be abolished or veiled under less brutal and downright forms. ”

“ To maintain a chattel slavery more cruel than ever existed in our Southern states. To uphold a political tyranny a hundred times more unjust than the one against which our men of Seventy-Six revolted. ”

“ If the masters of Mexico wished their slaves to be provident they should give them an opportunity to get something ahead and then guarantee not to steal it back again.
The poor Mexican is accused of being an inveterate thief. The way a Mexican laborer will accept money and then try to run away, instead of working for the rest of his life to pay off the debt, is, indeed, enough to bring tears to the eyes of the American grinder of enganchados. ”

“ I do not need to dwell on the election farces of Mexico, since the warmest flatterers of Diaz admit that Mexico has not had one real election during the past thirty-four years. But to those who desire some statement of the matter it will only be necessary to point out the results of the Mexican "elections." Can anyone imagine a nation of some 15,000,000 with, say 3,000,000 persons of voting age, all preferring the same man for their chief executive, not only once, but year after year and decade after decade? ”

“ David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, in recent speeches, has echoed Creelman's assertion that Diaz is the greatest man in the western hemisphere. And hundreds of our most distinguished citizens have expressed themselves in a similar vein. On the part of prominent Americans traveling in Mexico, it has become a custom, a sort of formality of the trip, to banquet at Chapultepec castle—the lesser lights at Chapultepec cafe—and to raise the after-dinner voice in most extravagant praise, loudly to attribute to Porfirio Diaz the virtues of a superman, even of a demi-god. ”

“ The action of the troops in seizing revolutionist supplies and arresting revolutionist recruits is not only against every tradition of political liberty upon which this nation is supposed to be based, but it is unlawful and criminal and punishable under the laws of the States by fine and imprisonment. It is not a crime against any federal or state law to ship food, or even arms and ammunition, into Mexico with the open intention of selling them to the revolutionists. ”

“ Cruel and revengeful is the Mexican president and bitterly has his nation suffered as a result of it.
Is Diaz a brave man? In some quarters it has been taken for granted that he is a man of courage, inasmuch as he made a success as a soldier. But there are many distinguished Mexicans who, having watched his career, assert that he is not only not brave, but that he is a shrinking, cringing coward. ”

“ WOOD CARRIERS, CITY OF MEXICO. "A MEXICAN LABORER IS CHEAPER THAN A HORSE capable in the higher functions of civilization as the Spaniards themselves. The most brilliant poets, artists, writers, musicians, men of science, military heroes and constructive statesmen in the history of Mexico were natives pure or natives but faintly crossed with the blood of Spain. On the whole, the Mexicans seem to exhibit stronger artistic and literary tendencies than we and less inclination toward commerce and heavy mechanics. The mass of the people are illiterate, but that does not mean that they are stupid. ”

“ As to clothing and shelter, the common Mexican has about as little of either as can be imagined. The tenements of New York City are palatial homes compared to the tenements of Mexico City. A quarter of a mile in almost any direction off Diaz's grand Paseo de la Reforma, the magnificent driveway over which tourists are always taken and by which they usually judge Mexico, will carry the investigator into conditions that are not seen in any city worthy the name of civilized. If in all Mexico there exists a city with a really modern sewer system I am ignorant of its name. ”

“ For what, pray, can be done to a chattel slave to make him work but to beat him? With the wage worker you have the fear of discharge or the reduction of wages to hold over his head and make him toe the mark, but the chattel slave would welcome discharge, and as to reducing his food supply, you don't dare to do that or you kill him outright. At least, that is the case in Yucatan.
One of the first sights we saw on a henequen plantation was the beating of a slave—a formal beating before the assembled toilers of the ranch early in the morning just after the daily roll call. ”

“ Two Indians, one at each end, poled and paddled the strange craft down the rushing stream, and from them we learned that the Indians themselves have had their day as slaves in Valle Nacional. The Spaniards tried to enslave them, but they fought to the death. They employed their tribal solidarity and fought in droves like wolves and in that way they regained and kept their freedom. Such a common understanding and such mass movements cannot, of course, be developed by the heterogeneous elements that today are brought together on the slave plantations. ”

“ In this chapter I have attempted to give the reader an idea of the means which General Diaz employed to attract support to his government. To sum up, by means of a careful placing of public offices, public contracts and special privileges of multitudinous sorts, Diaz absorbed all of the more powerful men and interests within his sphere and made them a part of his machine. Gradually the country passed into the hands of his officeholders, their friends, and foreigners. And for this the people paid, not only with their lands, but with their flesh and blood. They paid in peonage and slavery. ”