Thus it came about that despite the apparent incongruity of the fact, the Indians of Yucatan paid almost no attention to Alvarado’s land distribution plans, listening to the alluring official announcements with stolid indifference. They attended the festivals which accompanied the distribution, but they took up no land grants. There were indeed, many Indians who actually took flight into the interior of the state as a result of the efforts to force land upon them. The Mexican Indian, of whatever tribe, in reality desires deeply but one thing--to be left alone to pursue his half-savage life in his own way, an aboriginal ambition which should not be difficult to understand by those who know anything of the North American Indian of the United States. Socialism, like the responsibilities of land ownership, is beyond his ken and he literally ran away from the offers of either in Yucatan. Some Indians, of course, remained, along with a great number of the mixed-blood “slaves” who had been imported from the Mexican mainland into the state during the boom period of the henequen business. These were thoroughly “unionized” in the Mexican sense. That is, they were forced to pay their poor little three pesos for a big red card which proclaimed their membership in some union or other, were promised all that the human heart could desire--and were allowed to subsist as long as possible upon the promises. The unions were used to the double end of ruining the capitalistic landlords and reducing the output of henequen so that the price would go higher. On the plantations where these “unionized” workmen remained, the old task system, by which each man cut from 2,500 to 3,000 leaves a day, was abandoned for a regular “eight-hour day” in which the workmen did as little as they cared to do, and worked, not under instructions, but wherever they chose to work. As a result the cutting of leaves was reduced fully one-half, and the plants near the roads were overcut while those deep in the fields were allowed to blossom and go to seed. Both processes killed the henequen, which has to be cut regularly and skillfully in order to prolong its life of usefulness. For miles the great pole-like blossoms marked the henequen fields like a forest, and thousands of productive acres went to ruin. Thus Nature’s inevitable process of flowering and decay marked, itself, man’s crass flinging back of her riches into the dust from which those riches had come in the long slow years of his care of her. Meanwhile, other forces had been at work, some building the pyramid of mad ideas and madder methods, others undermining the pyramid’s foundations upon the rocks of the conservative past or disintegrating its mortar of imitation socialistic idealism. Of these forces, the greatest was the financial cycle of paper money, “short” drafts and towering mortgages against increasing stocks of unsold henequen.