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MEXICO AND ITS RECONSTRUCTION
lation is inspired by a hunger for possession of land. One of the manifestos issued reads in part:[1]
The man of the fields was hungry and full of misery; he had been exploited beyond endurance and at last he took up arms to win the bread which the rich in their greed had denied him; to obtain possession of the lands which were in the grasp of the selfish proprietors. . . . He embarked upon revolution, not to win illusory political rights which fail to provide food, but to procure a bit of ground which would yield him bread, liberty, a home, independence, and a chance to get ahead. . . . The greater part, if not all of the territory, which must be "nationalized" represents land wrested from some small proprietors with the connivance of the Diaz dictatorship. The second aim is the restoration of these lands to their original individual owners, and to the. . . pueblos. This great act of justice will be followed by presenting those who never had anything with a portion of the lands confiscated from the accomplices of dictatorship, or expropriated from the spendthrift heirs of the old land robbers, who do not even trouble themselves to cultivate their inheritance. Thus will the hunger for land and the appetite for liberty, which are felt from one end of the republic to the other be satisfied.
There is little to show that any such general land hunger exists among the peasant population. Except in a few districts desire for land on the part of the lower classes was conspicuous by its absence before the revolution and is not general now.
- ↑ The manifesto of Zapata from which these extracts are taken was published in the Voz de Juarez, of Mexico City, August 20, 1914, and later republished in part in the Review of Reviews, vol. 50, p. 630, November, 1914. Though issued by the leader of the state where land hunger it is alleged did exist, the declaration applied to the whole of the republic.
