CHAPTER XII
THE MEXICAN LABORER: HIS OPPORTUNITIES
It is safe to say that no great colonizing power ever handled the land problems that confronted it in a new and sparsely settled territory in a way that later generations have found satisfactory. To those who, in the age of discovery, set out to increase the national domain, the home governments gave grants of what they found—land. Had these large early grants, often with the most indefinite boundaries, continued in the hands of their original owners they would have been a great abuse in practically all the colonies of the world. But they very seldom did so. The estates fell apart by their own unwieldiness. Accumulations of property by institutions, notably the church, often held together to a greater degree but even these in most cases later broke up by the development of new economic conditions or by political measures directed against the holders.
Mexico is no exception to the rule. The grants of the colonial period are not the cause of present-day land problems, nor is the church an element that complicates agrarian conditions. The land question of the republic is of its own creation. To it three elements have prominently contributed, the tendency of the upper classes to put their capital into land rather than into industrial ventures, the breaking up of the communal land hold-
148
