This henequen, the sisal hemp of commerce, was first exported in 1864, and by 1880 was one of the well-known but minor fibers in the American market. In 1898, when the Spanish-American war cut off the exports of Manila hemp, henequen sprang into immediate and great importance, its price rose from 2¹⁄₂ cents to 10 cents a pound in New York, and an immediate increase in the industry and in the economic importance of the state of Yucatan took place. There was a lively boom in henequen lands, and incidentally an improvement in social and political conditions in Yucatan, followed by something of a slump with a few mild panics around 1907. But henequen fiber had been definitely established in the market and selling as it did at an average price of 5¹⁄₄ cents a pound, became the great staple for the manufacture of binder twine. This new and virtually inexhaustible supply of cheap fiber for twine-making played its part in the broadening use of the mechanical harvester, until by 1915 Yucatan henequen binder twine was being shipped to every wheat producing area in the world, from the Siberian steppes to the pampas of the Argentine. In 1914 the exports from Mexico were more than a million bales or approximately 400,000,000 pounds, which was a doubling of production in fourteen years. The current price of about 6 cents a pound had enabled the Yucatan growers to build up immense fortunes and made it possible for the manufacturers of the thousands of tons of binder twine to furnish it to the American farmer at less than 10 cents a pound. The chief manufacturers of binder twine and, therefore, the chief buyers of Yucatan henequen, are the International Harvester Company, which makes about half the binder twine used in the world, the Plymouth Cordage Company, which makes about a quarter of the entire supply, and various state penitentiaries in the wheat belt of the United States. All of these manufacturers work on close margins for the Harvester Company’s business is selling harvester machines and it seems interested materially in keeping the price of such accessories as twine as low as possible. The effect of this, combined with Yankee shrewdness, has been a continuous effort to keep the price of Yucatan henequen down to rock bottom, and to this end its buyers have been cheerful arbiters of the price of the sisal in the Mexican market. They were never, however, quite the grasping, grinding capitalistic despots they were described as being by the Yucatecans, for those of us who can remember back into the philosophic days before 1914 will recollect that it was not customary for even American capital to kill the geese that laid the golden eggs. The Yucatan hacendados were encouraged to demand, and get, comfortable prices for their product, and incidentally to plant large new acreages of the henequen plants.