offered resistance, as they occasionally did, they were slaughtered wholesale by the soldiery. A case in point is the Tomochic Massacre of 1892, where the death-roll was placed at between 1,000 and 2,000, many of the victims being defenceless women and children. And this is but one of many instances of "judicial" robbery being followed up by "judicial" murder.
Even a tyrant may be excused in part if a sufficiently great motive be found for his tyranny. Diaz's motive may be reckoned in American dollars, American capitalistic support and patronage. The great capitalists, who were always the power behind the Presidential chair, bought up the territories thus obligingly accorded them; plantations of rubber, sugar, and tobacco sprang up and yielded substantial profits. But labour was required to work these great plantations—cheap labour. And here Diaz deliberately planned the great crime of his career, for in order to provide the labour he literally sold his people into slavery. Not only the properties of the deported Indians were forfeited—the people themselves were "confiscated," and forced to become chattel slaves on some hennequen farm or Southern plantation. The system once started, became more and more embracive. Criminals, instead of being imprisoned, were handed over to the slave-traders to undergo far worse punishment. If the demand exceeded the supply, the jefe politico, or district governor, could always trump up a charge against some poor creature, whom it was not even necessary to bring to trial. Failing that, it was a comparatively simple matter to kidnap a peon or a labourer. But the method chiefly adopted was that known as "contract labour," a thinly disguised system of slave-trading, to be described later.
Since the whole political and legal system of Mexico is involved, it may be questioned just how far President Diaz was responsible for the infamous dealings carried out under the cloak and cover of his Government. Doubtless much independent plundering and slave-trading went on among
