best material they have ever had to deal with for doing rough work. Others think him "next after the Irish," "fully the equal of the Italian," and "as good as any immigrant labor I ever dealt with." Estimates of less favorable character are quite as numerous, and the Mexican employer appears to have quite as much to say about the shortcomings of the native laborer as does the foreigner. The fact that the estimates of his ability are not regional, that there is no ethnological nor sociological unity among the population, and that some foreign and some Mexican employers have marked success in using native labor in districts where others find it very inefficient makes it hard to arrive at any estimate of the Mexican as a laborer that is fair.
In whatever part of the country that is under discussion the laborer is, as a rule, an Indian laborer. He is the fulcrum of Mexican society. As one of the most thorough of Mexican students says, "Amidst the most terrible sufferings and crushed by all sorts of hardship the indigenous population is sustaining us, socially speaking: it carries on the agricultural labor throughout the Republic, works the mines, and effectuates all hard and heavy toils." "Our subordination to the indigenes is so patent that our actual existence depends exclusively on them."[1]
The work that the Indian has been called upon to do thus far has been, as a rule, such as to test his physical endurance and industry but has given him little opportunity to show his abilities in skilled trades. The most
- ↑ Justus Sierra, editor, Mexico, Its Social Evolution, vol. 1, p. 50.
