This is the outcome of Yucatan’s experiments in Alvarado’s brand of so-called socialism. The price of the fiber is back to less than it was before the inflation began, the production has been cut from 1,000,000 bales in 1914 to less than 700,000 in 1919, a decline of 30 per cent, while, taking the potential production from the plantings up to 1914, the present production is about half of what it would have been if Alvarado had never come to Yucatan. The haciendas are back in the hands of their original owners, the market is in the hands of foreign capital, and foreign capital is fighting over the spoils with what seems to the Yucatecans utter and cruel disregard of the amenities of gentlemen. The $112,000,000 squeezed from American farmers and the other untold millions taken from Yucatan by loot, by false prices in “coöperative stores,” by freight rates on the graft-owned railways, and all the other means used by Alvarado’s retainers, have gone to the enrichment of his group and to the upkeeping of the Carranza government. No noticeable part of it has remained in Yucatan, and save for increased wages all around (and the world has surely learned that this is not prosperity) no possible profit has remained. The spiral cycle is complete, and none has gained, not even the predatory capitalists, who are unhappily cutting each other’s throats in an effort to solve the problems into which they were swept by the machinations of Alvarado and his henchmen. To-day Yucatan is not free from the domination of the “socialists,” but that domination is political, marked by those outrages which have come to be merely a part of politics in Mexico. Elections are held from time to time, elections wherein two parties of socialists alone confronted each other. The battle is bitter, as battles are when brothers are the contestants. There is still killing and loot, and women and children suffer death and worse in the solution of such glowing political questions as whether, we might say, the flag of Yucatan should be all red or merely red with a black bar across it--its problems are daily forgotten, for the real issue is only to find out who should have the next hand at the graft. Socialistic, to be sure, because all Mexican manifestations to-day are masquerading under the name of socialism, but quite as little in tune with true socialistic ideals as a battle between two factions in Tammany Hall over the control of New York politics would be socialism. FOOTNOTES: [6] Both peonage and the Mexican systems of land distribution are discussed at some length in _The People of Mexico_. CHAPTER VIII THE ROMANCE OF MEXICAN OIL