able number of the natives were never touched by it and, especially with the development of the economic resources of the country, there came into existence, in the larger cities, along the railroads, in the mines, textile working communities, oil fields, and elsewhere a class dependent upon the wage system such as it is known in other countries. These workmen lived, as a rule, under conditions less favorable than those found in the United States. They were better off, however, in both living conditions and wages, than the average Mexican laborer. They seemed to be the beginning of a labor class similar to those found in more advanced communities.
The pictures that have generally been drawn in the United States of labor conditions in Mexico at the end of the Diaz régime are unfair. A great deal of sympathy has been wasted on that portion of the Yaqui tribes that was transferred from the northwest to Yucatan and Campeche, though there were undoubted abuses committed in the process. There were, in certain regions in the southern states, labor conditions altogether indefensible but they were not general. The "shanghaiing" of men from the cities, especially the capital, for work on plantations on the isthmus of Tehuantepec seems to have occurred in a large number of cases but such practices were not a real part of the peonage system.[1] The worst abuses of this sort, roundly denounced by all responsible Mexicans, appear to have occurred in the Valle Nacional of Oaxaca. Such conditions involving the herding of the victims into barbed wire en-
- ↑ See Wallace Thompson, op. cit., p. 326, et seq.
