brands, assigning all their woes to the companies and to society in general.

In nearly all of these towns the people are deprived of any participation in the affairs of their own little public. The companies own the school-houses and the stores; they choose the school directors and peace officers; in many instances they even supervise the activities of the fraternal orders. In the counties of Las Animas and Huerfano practically every civil officer owes his election to the companies. The men live under despotism so absolute that the radical labor press is not far wrong in calling them slaves. Such repression of their mental and moral natures inevitably results in unfitting them for a very intelligent exercise of the suffrage, though at heart they are for the most part intensely patriotic. We must expect industrial warfare ill by the exercise of all of the rights of citizenship the workers come to a realization of the proper attitude of man to man and group to group in a democracy. It would be good business for the companies to allow the men to acquire lots for houses, stores, and public buildings, and allow them to incorporate and govern their own villages for the common good. But the companies make large profits from rents and merchandise, and no doubt prefer present profits, and the risk of losing them through the violence of the strikers, to the prospect of steady gains in the future from the improved character of their employees. But whether the companies lose or gain by it, the State should see to it that its citizens have the opportunity to exercise all of the rights guaranteed to them by a democratic government.

The ordinary educational facilities of civilized communities are either defective or wanting in the mining communities. Let it be said, in justice, that the work done in the schools is surprisingly good. The schoolhouses are built and maintained by the coal companies, and compare favorably with the grade schools of communities of equal population in other sections of the State. However, of all the schools in the mining villages, only one, so far as the writer could learn, does as high as eighth-grade work. Thus high school work is impossible for practically the entire school population. As a rule the boys are taken from school as early as the law allows and put to work in the mines. In fact, the people are entirely without any of the means by which the aver

age man keeps himself in touch with public affairs. Facilities for instruction and inspiration in matters pertaining to private and social ethics are very meager indeed. It is admitted that it will require money, time, and genius to create among such a mixed people conditions under which a normal intellectual life can be maintained, but whatever price may be paid, it cannot be too high.

It is not the writer's purpose to fix the blame for the unfavorable conditions described in this article. Both operators and miners are guilty of much that is wrong.

It must not be concluded from facts recited in this article that the miners now on strike in Colorado are inherently vicious or criminal. On the contrary, they are essentially as good as the average man, but that they are being rapidly debauched and degraded by conditions over which they have no control seems to be only too apparent; and these disagreeable facts are being recited in order to illustrate the principle that social ills, and especially those which are associated with the question of labor, are the natural outgrowth of the moral and social environment in which the masses of the people live and labor. The question of wages cannot be ignored, but it is not of supreme importance.

CO

When the union officers began to agitate a strike, they found Colorado a promising field. Their agitation did more than secure operation. It released a flood of passionate protest, a long pent-up spirit of revolution which neither they nor any other human power could control. The moral and social environment in which the men had labored and in which their wives and children had lived had given only the most elemental human emotions opportunity for development. Therefore it is not surprising that violence has played a large part in the events of this strike. This is not intended as an excuse for violence, but an explanation.

The conditions which produce the striker also produce the strike leader, as the majority of the latter come from the ranks of labor. The labor leader should possess the highest type of statesmanship. If he does not, he not only endangers his own cause but becomes a menace to society at large. Thus industrial conditions not only affect the workers themselves, but determine the characters of a class of leaders who in turn determine the moral and social attitudes of millions of American citizens.

P

ANCHO VILLA slipped into the city of Chihuahua one night while I was there with an absence of ceremony as different as black from white from the ostentatious manner in which Carranza had entered a week before.

Since his sudden burst into fame a few months ago Villa has iterated and reiterated that he is a fighter first and a politician afterwards, and the proof that he is a politician of a very shrewd sort lies in the consistency with which he has maintained this character.

I had planned to go to Torreon to see the hero of the battle of that name, but this time instead of Mohammed going to the mountain the mountain came to Mohammed. On the afternoon after his arrival I climbed the hill, on which the eastern half of Chihuahua is built, to the ornate two-story terra-cotta house, confiscated from a wealthy Huertista, in which Villa has installed his Chihuahua wife -it is commonly said that one can count Villa's victories from Juarez south by counting the number of " Mrs. Panchos" along the line.

Pushing through the ring of women and children who pressed their faces against the bars of the iron fence before the house in patient expectation of glimpsing their hero, I got by the sentry after showing my Carranza passport and entered the hall of the house, which, like the Carranza residence across the street, is typical of the residence of the upstart Mexican millionaire in the cheapness, vulgarity, and lack of taste of its interior decorations. Nothing here was quite so glaring as the interior of the Carranza mansion, however. There, though the country boasts the best cedar in the world, the wainscoting is an imitation of this wood in oilcloth with the grain painted on. The parlor of that house is a bedlam of color, with silver sphinxes and Cupids on white walls and ceiling further

decorated" with pink and gold plaster filigree, and with a bright saffron carpet supporting pink cuspidors bearing the Carranza monogram. The best Mexican custom demands a householder's monogram on everything from flower-pots to cuspidors.

The prevalence of execrable taste in art in

Mexico is inexplicable. Certainly it is not inherited from the Spaniards, nor apparently from the Indians, whose crude pottery and basket-work often show a fine feeling for beauty.

In the hall of the Villa house two Americans were waiting, anxiously watching a door from behind which came noises that indicated that the General and staff were enjoying a late dinner. The taller of the two confided that he was a machine-gunner and wanted to complain that at the battle of Torreon his Mexican colleagues had tried to keep him from his rightful share of the honors and loot, and that one had even thrown a can of beans at him. The other, an auburn-haired youth with mournful brown eyes and an Alabama drawl, was seeking permission to go to the States" and get his

knee adjudicated." A mule had stepped on it while he lay asleep at Gomez Palacio, and a pair of silver hinges fitted on by a Mexican doctor at great expense had proved more ornamental than useful. This lugubrious artilleryman, like the other Americans with Villa, frankly admitted the sordidness of his motives in risking his neck in Mexico.

"It is a cold-blooded business proposition with me," he said. "I hope Wilson doesn't butt in and start a war with Mexico, for I've got enough stuff cached to be worth a neat little pile when we get to Mexico City."

So far these American pot-hunters have been grievously disappointed in the revolution. There has not been so much looting as they expected, and always in the division of the spoils they have been slighted by the native soldiers. They are usually given the most dangerous work to do and are seldom paid for it. Sans loot, sans pay, and sans the respect of the men for whom they are fighting, they are a sorry crew of adven

turers.

The door opened, and there emerged a big, chunky man of butternut color shuffling his feet and rolling his shoulders like a Negro longshoreman. I was in the presence of Pancho Villa, yesterday a bandit, to-day the hero of the North, to-morrow perhaps

President of Mexico. Following him and fawning upon him like curs upon a mastiff were three or four officers of his staff and a dapper little concession hunter from Durango.

Villa thrust out a hand as soft as a baby's and led me into his office, papered blood-red, with a crimson carpet, the concession hunter following as interpreter. The interview was not very satisfactory. Few interviews with Villa are. In the first place, he has been coached in the art of talking much and saying nothing. In the second place, his Spanish is about on a par with the English of a plantation Negro, and the English of the Durango man was below that of the most illiterate Negro that ever picked cotton. I was careful not to ask Villa of his relations with Carranza, a question that has never failed to arouse his celebrated temper, and confined myself to discussion of his personal prowess and of his plans to make Mexico a peons' paradise.

They teli a lot of stories about Villa. While some are probably false, like some of the stories they tell about Lincoln, like the Lincoln stories they give you a pretty good impression of the man. It is said that he killed his best man at his wedding—that is, the original ceremony performed before he was famous; that he robbed a poor prospector who befriended him; and that when a friend, in congratulating him upon a victory, compared him with Napoleon, the rebel chief asked, "Quien es este gran hombre ?”—“Who is this great man?" Like all uneducated Mexicans, he had the most profound ignorance of the United States until his contact with the educated people of his race, following his sudden rise to prominence, forced knowledge upon him. He once got into an argument with an American over the relative size of Mexico and the United States.

Carranza, an educated man, and not he, a blunt soldier, should be President of Mexico in the event of the complete triumph of Constitutionalism. Yet those who know him best say that he is inordinately ambitious, and that months ago, with only a handful of tattered horsemen in his command, he was planning to be President, or at least Governor of Chihuahua.

His

Physically Villa is a superb animal. bullet-shaped head is set closely on a pair of heavy shoulders, which are not, however, out of proportion with the rest of his anatomy, for he is built like a heavy-weight wrestler. He is dark for a Mexican, and of a smooth darkness that makes the talk of a strain of Negro blood seem not improbable. His nost distinguishing features are his cruel mouth which can smile most unctuously, and his eyes, bloodshot, protruding, and piercing. A reporter who saw them blazing at Torreon describes them as "the eyes of a man who will some day go crazy. They have a certain intelligence or craftiness, but they are not eyes to inspire trust.

Chihuahua presents all the anomalies of a city that has been turned upside down in a class revolution. You drive through the town in an upholstered brougham, which has been the peon hack-driver's share in the confiscation of a cientifico's property, between rows of handsome residences peopled by the officers and soldiers of the rebellion. The stores of the Huertistas have been seized and their stock is being sold out to the faithful pelados at bargain prices. At the Nuevo Mundo, a large department store owned by a Spaniard who was forced to flee for his life, you can buy goods for onetenth of what they would cost in the United States. Here I got a bottle of three-dollar port for thirty cents, gold, and a two-dollar cheese for twenty cents, gold. Nominally, living in Chihuahua costs about what it did before the revolution, but, because price-tags have not been changed while money has depreciated, it is really much less if you figure by the gold standard. I had a large room with a bath and three sumptuous meals a day at the best hotel in town for four pesos, or about eighty cents in United States currency.

To a large extent the people are only getting back what has been taken from them. The communal Indian lands left to the tribes at the time of the conquest were gradually acquired by the haciendados and the Church,

In

sometimes by legal stealing, sometimes through the folly of the proletariat. Practically all that was left of these "comunidados," as the lands held in common were called, were taken from the Indians by a trick that had the sanction of Porfirio Diaz. 1894 it was announced that on a certain day all landowners must appear before a designated official and swear to the propriety of their claims. Notices were posted to this effect in the towns, but the Indians either failed to see the notices, or, seeing them, were unable to read them, and as they neglected to go through the prescribed ceremony their lands were declared forfeit and sold to the favored rich, whose estates were already swollen enormously.

The Constitutionalists have carried their programme of reconstruction in Mexico a good deal further than seems to be generally known. For some reason they are very chary about speaking of their reforms to a "gringo," probably because a Mexican looks upon all foreigners as intruders who are in the country to help themselves rather than the country. One of the best fruits of the revolution is a law which was established by Madero in Coahuila limiting the debts of peons employed on haciendas, and canceling them. when they reach a certain size. Although Hidalgo decreed the end of slavery in 1810, it has virtually continued under the abominable hacienda laws by which the peons are always in debt to their employers and may never seek new employment till the debts are paid.

Child labor is an old sore in Mexico. Carranza has passed laws against it in Sonora and Coahuila, and promises to do so in other Constitutionalist territory. The Constitutionalist scheme for dividing the land of the rich among the poor is well exemplified in Tamaulipas and in Durango. In the former state General Blanco has given about twenty acres to each of the soldiers who fought with him there. The men have settled their families on this land, and they are now hundreds of miles away on the west coast of Mexico fighting for more homesteads. In the city of Durango there has been a division of the municipal land. Each citizen is allowed to purchase two and a half acres at prices ranging from eighty centavos to a peso and sixty centavos a month, for one hundred months. As a matter of fact, although the average peon wants a little home of his own, he is satisfied with very little land and very

little money. The paymaster of a large corporation in Mexico once tried the plan of giving the women of his employees a supply of food for a week, instead of doing it out by the day as usual. That was on Monday On Tuesday the men failed to put in an appearance, and, when found, were taking their ease in their homes, eating the company's food. They said that there was no object in working while there was food in the cupboard, and threats of force were necessary to make them work. The paymaster returned to the old method of food distribution.

While in Chihuahua I visited the smelter of the American Smelting and Refining Company, on the outskirts of the city. Scores of peons are employed here, and a highsalaried white employee of the company told me that their average wage was a peso and a quarter a day-about sixty cents gold in normal times, and from ten to thirty cents gold at present, as the Villa money fluctuates. This man said that the company dreaded the successful termination of the revolution, as it would mean the formation of labor unions and the consequent rise of wages. Several American wholesale employers of peon labor in Mexico frankly admit that they prefer ten years of anarchy followed by "the good old days of peon labor" to intervention of any kind which would mean the restoration of peace and a higher wage scale. It is such men who frequently pay as low wages as seventy-five cents Mex." per diem, and it was they who flimflammed their employees with all sorts of "hospital taxes" and other devices for reducing actual net wages until the revolution frightened most of them from the country. It is they and their ilk, too, who have justified a good deal of the universal hatred for Americans in Mexico.

This hatred, always smoldering, glowed red hot when the news of the conflict between the United States and Huerta filtered into northern Mexico. At first it was confined to dark glances and muttered curses when an American passed on the street. then, in Chihuahua, the resentment became more open and signs reading "Mueran los gringos""Death to gringoes !"—were posted in the street. Before it had reached this stage the Consuls had advised all Americans to leave the country as soon as they could wind up their affairs, and refugee trains had begun to start for the border. I took one of these trains. When it rolled into Chihuahua from