which professed to do so, did not enforce the laws passed strictly. The effort to do away with the pulque trade in the federal district, for example, became one to reduce the number of shops where it was dispensed. Yucatan, which boasted itself a dry state, was so on little more than the surface.
Besides these general social legislation measures, there were others designed to benefit labor at the expense of the hacendados, and factory and mine owners, and, in fact, all the interests that were looked upon as representing the capitalistic régime recently overthrown. Hours of labor for men, women, and children; rates of wages; peons' wages; peons' debts; employers' liability; settlement of industrial disputes; the holding of large estates; and an indefinite list of similar subjects were regulated by new legislation. Often these measures adopted the most advanced standards of legislation found in European countries or the United States, too frequently they aimed to put into effect the extreme demands of the ultra radicals in these countries. There was little consideration given to the question of the applicability of the proposed standards to Mexican conditions.
Of course, some measures could be forced upon the interests affected under threats, such as confiscation of property or the taking over of its operation by the local governmental authorities. Others, for example, those involving land settlements, could be pushed through by taking property under at least the form of legal process and distributing it to the persons, whose rights, it was alleged, former legislation had disregarded. This, for
