In every State governors, jefes politicos, and cientificos robbed the Indians of the land in their possession. By the year 1892 all the great bodies of agricultural land had passed from the possession of more than a million small farmers into the hands of less than fifty rich families and corporations of the Diaz clique. The State of Morelos (2,734 square miles) and a population of 179,614 inhabitants, became practically the property of half a dozen families. In the State of Chihuahua one family alone, the Terrazas, owned as much land as the combined territory of Switzerland, Belgium and Holland. Towards the end of the Diaz régime nearly 3,000,000 Indians had been despoiled of their native land and General Diaz had sold over 83,000,000 acres for the paltry sum of $3,000,000. The policy of General Diaz was to eliminate the Mexican Indian peons from valuable land and from an independent economic life into peonage in great haciendas, in great mines and factories where they could be more easily controlled by the rurales and the soldiers. At the height of Diaz’s rule, in 1908, when all the world was singing the pæans to the glory of Porfirio Diaz, the writer found out by personal investigation that the average salary for unskilled labor in the mines near the city of Pachuca (inh. 40,000) was three cents gold a day, and in the haciendas six cents gold. What was the result of this policy of despoliation and oppression? Simply that wages in the great haciendas, mines, and factories were kept as low as possible, while prices of food stuffs and necessities went up by the help of a rigid system of high tariff. The great haciendados, the foreign owners of mines and industrial concerns, the same ones who were reaping a golden harvest and singing the praise of Diaz’s rule were buying labor in Mexico at a very low Mexican silver rate and were selling the result of this labor at a gold rate. The press agents of Diaz spoke of the perfect school system inaugurated at the beginning of his rule. General Diaz never could have crushed Mexico in the iron grip of his hand if education had been as general as was claimed. The percentage of illiteracy in the thirty-five years of the czar’s rule was lowered from ninety to eighty-six per cent. but only in the cities. The rural school system was almost completely neglected, or was turned over to the care of priests and nuns. It was this fourteen per cent. of the people who could read and write, which organized the agitation in Mexico under tremendous difficulties and by unheard-of sacrifices. The political advisers of Diaz never dreamed that every Indian who was expatriated, every workingman who saw the murders of his companions, every Mexican who suffered from an unjust imprisonment, became an incipient rebel, only awaiting the time that a leader would show them their strength and the way to break the chains of their economic and political slavery.