settled down on the ranch, and became a fixture. Soon he had a wife, a garden plot, some chickens, and a pig or two. He worked during the week and on Saturday night appeared for his wage balance, if any, which he proceeded to spend on the simple but powerful luxuries to which his generation was accustomed. Generally he did not try to pay his debts but to increase them. To have a heavy debt was for many a sign of standing in the community, an evidence that the employer had confidence in the employee.
In the latter part of the Diaz régime, in some of the sugar and coffee plantations of Vera Cruz the day labor, task and share-rent systems were apparently gradually displacing the classic form of peonage. A French plantation operator employing between 700 and 1,000 workmen in the low lands worked his fields by means of men recruited chiefly from the higher altitudes. Many of his neighbors had adopted the share-rent system of employment. He himself preferred to get his labor through capitanes to whom he paid five per cent of the wages of the day laborers as premium. Of these laborers about one-fourth were induced to live on the estate, the rest were casuals paid 50 cents Mexican per tarea or from 56 to 72 cents Mexican, if on a day labor basis. In this district, as elsewhere, the lack of ambition was alleged to be a prominent characteristic of the laborer. He would not do more than one tarea though he could easily do two. Those who lived on the estate, though they were given garden plots, seldom cultivated them efficiently and the share renters, when the return for the season's harvest was paid them, almost without
