root the well established characteristics of the employment contracts. It is true, of course, that labor conditions during the Diaz régime varied widely in different parts of Mexico. The men were not uniformly good workers, they were not uniformly content with their lot as they found it, and the conditions of their employment varied with the traditional arrangements observed and with the degree to which foreign influences had come in to upset the unprogressive but generally contented habits of the slow-moving local life. But none of these influences created a general demand for betterment of the condition of the laborer. The labor problem was in the greater part of the republic one which, to the employer, meant how to get labor, not how to satisfy the demands of an organized labor class.
The Mexican government has never had a thorough study of the labor conditions among its own people. It does not know officially to-day in more than the most general way the usual terms of contract, the wages, or the living conditions of the laboring classes. The best picture that can be given must be based on incomplete official surveys supplemented by the observations of travelers, the experience of the many foreigners who, in their enterprises, have come into contact with the Mexican peon, and the testimony of those who have been prominent in support of the recent labor movement or in its opposition. In the years 1885-8 the government published the results of a labor survey of Mexico which is even up to the present time the most comprehensive effort of the sort that has been made in the republic. Though the answers to the questionnaires
