The record-union., 1896-09-27

Mexican blacksmiths, carpenters and
other artisans receive only seventy-five
cents per day, or thirty-nine cents in
American money. In my remaining
figures, to avoid repetition, 1 will give
the amounts in American money, or
better named, sound money" A po-
liceman gets fifty-one cents per day, a
common laborer from eighteen to thirty
cents. Postal carriers get from So to
SO per month. Clerks receive from So
to SD per month. House rent for the
poor laborer is 81 80 to So a month
gold, of course. He must live on beans
and corncakes, often without a table to
eat from, with no bed for himself and
family, except a mat on the floor, with
no furniture in the room of his house,
save perhaps a little box that serves for
trunk. One suit of clothes for him
SELF one for his wife, and a piece of a
suit for each child, and of children
there are usually plenty. AT night
they must sleep in the clothes worn dur
ing the day, unless fortune has been
kinder to them than is usually the case.
OF course there are exceptions, and
frugality, industry and tidiness, backed
by sobriety and diligence, have over
y,
family will be found in comparative
comfort. The statements that are being
published as to the Mexican laborer
building himself home you may set
down as unmitigated bosh. In a few
places, men who are working land on
shares are allowed a little corner some-
where, where they can erect an adobe
house. or a bamboo hut, into which
they crowd their families, and often all
their relatives, with them; but to say
that the time has come when the labor
ing classes of Mexico are supplying
themselves with homes is simple nom
sense, in addition to being false.
HOW 1T CAME ABOUT.
Mexico was once rich. 1t was when
the Spanish invader came in, in the year
lol3, and found the people engaged in
the peaceable tillage of the soil There
We're a few silver mines, but they were
worked only to slight extent. The
Spaniard wanted silver, and he wanted
1t badly. Neither the Moors nor the
Spaniards ever took kindly to gold. 1t
was in the year 1919, and those succeed
ing when the Spaniard needed silver with
which to carry on his European wars
especially those with the people of the
Netherlands, that the Mexicans were
taken from their fields and put to work
in the mines. Thus the economic condi-
tions of the country were changed. Some
of the lands then abandoned have not
been touched since, and the independent
spirit OF the tiller Of the soil was broken
broken on the wheel of silver. For 800
years silver has flowed forth in an unin-
terrupted and prolific stream, finding it's
way unto the ends of the earth, but the
laboring classes of Mexico are worse off,
and have been, than We're their progeni
tors before the working of the mines
had commenced.
1t is hard to understand the blind IA
tality Of my countrymen who want a
free coinage of silver. If they are sue
cessful in engrafting the Mexican finan
cial system, so far as silver is con-
cerned, upon the American people, they
certainly will rue the day they accom-
plish it. Do not misunderstood me;
Mexico is looking up; she is coming
forward among the nations; she is feel
ing everywhere the pulsations Of a new
life. But it is not because she has free
silver, since she has always had it, but
because she has an enlightened and pro-
gresSive Government, with a magnifi
cent man at its head, and guarantees to
every man who comes here to invest his
capital in the infant industries of the
country that he and his industries shall
be protected. This gives prosperity to
the capitalist and more labor to the
wOrkingman.
/ wish every American could see for
himself the abject condition of the
laboring class of this country under
free silver, and there would then be no
doubt as to how he would vote in the
coming election.
REV. WILLIAM II. SLOAN.
City of Mexico, September ,, 1896.