several hundred backs yearly in the work. "Women are cheaper than machines," was the reply.
In Valle Nacional the slaves seemed to me to work all the time. I saw them working in the morning twilight. I saw them working in the evening twilight. I saw them working far into the night. "If we could use the water power of the Papaloapan to light our farms we could work our farms all night," Manuel Lagunas told me, and I believe he would have done it. The rising hour on the farms is generally 4 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes it is earlier. On all but three or four of the thirty farms the slaves work every day in the year—until they fall. At San Juan del Rio, one of the largest, they have a half holiday every Sunday. I happened to be at San Juan del Rio on a Sunday afternoon. That half holiday! What a grim joke! The slaves spent it in jail, locked up to keep them from running away!
And they fall very fast. They are beaten, and that helps. They are starved, and that helps. They are given no hope, and that helps. They die in anywhere from one month to a year, the time of greatest mortality being between the sixth and eighth month. Like the cotton planters of our South before the war, the tobacco planters seem to have their business figured down to a fine point. It was a well-established business maxim of our cotton planters that the greatest amount of profit could be wrung from the body of a negro slave by working him to death in seven years and then buying another one. The Valle Nacional slave holder has discovered that it is cheaper to buy a slave for $45 and work and starve him to death in seven months, and then spend $45 for a fresh slave, than it is to give the first slave better food, work him less sorely and stretch out his life and his toiling hours over a longer period of time.
