But the system of debt advances was really effectively abolished under Madero, two full years before Carranza and Alvarado entered upon the scene, and it is worth noting that the hacendados, many of whom had fortunes tied up in peon debts, found themselves far happier to be free from the system than were the peons. It is indeed questionable whether the peonage system, as such (and where it was not abused), was entirely distasteful to the Indians who were its victims. Lacking any ability to save, the abolition of the system of debt advances wrenched from their grasp the only possible form of enjoying the fruits of their labor outside their usual hand-to-mouth existence. Under the old systems they were able to have some of the good things of life by getting an advance in money, which they spent gayly, careless of the future, and then proceeded to work out the debt in the months or years which followed. Basically, the system had its redeeming features, when considered from the viewpoint of Indian psychology, even though the abuses were such that its abolition was inevitable. Linked up with the peonage system was the land distribution question, far too complicated for its origins to be gone into here.[6] In Yucatan, the most heavily populated section is not the most fertile. Henequen is not grown in the forests back from the sandy seacoast where prehistoric civilization left the great ruins of a rich and glorious empire, but on the seacoast itself. This virtual desert, extending in some places twenty-five miles back from the coast, is the land which is adapted to the growing of henequen, for a slow maturing of the plant is vital to the creation of those long, strong fibers which constitute the valuable portion of the leaves. This so-called desert land is sometimes capable, when first cleared of brush, of one or even two croppings of corn. Then it must lie fallow for many years before another food crop can be raised. The native Indian, therefore, has little or no use for a small plot, or indeed for the ownership of any plot of ground, unless he can crop it once or twice and then sell it to a henequen planter, while the Indian seeks other corn-lands elsewhere. If the government hampers him in moving about, he prefers not to try to live as an independent farmer, but to work on a plantation where he can get regular pay for cutting henequen leaves, and also can cultivate a little corn-plot lent him by the hacendado and renewed each year.