CHAPTER III

THE PEOPLE WHO BUY

A bamboo hut with a clumsy thatch of grass, a hovel of sundried bricks, made, as the Israelites made them, of straw and clay, a shack of unfinished lumber or rotting railway ties topped with a roof of laminated sheet-iron--these are the symbols of the social level of Mexico. Within them all a dirt floor, a box filled with earth for a brazier, two or three earthenware pots, a _metate_ over which the woman bends at her endless task of grinding meal for the family cakes of unleavened corn, a few rush mats for beds and a tawdry shrine with a dim light before it--the inert millions of Mexico live to-day as they have lived for a thousand years.

Their minds untutored, their thoughts and desires confined literally to the animal plane, their religious instincts almost entirely superstition, their government the support of rulers upon the vast misery of the lowly, Mexico finds her parallels only in China and in Turkey. And Mexico is at our own back door, the cynosure of our most hopeful tradesmen!

Up until ten years ago, there was an aristocracy in Mexico counting in its make-up many able men, groups of able men, devoted as far as their lights allowed them, to a paternalistic care of the Indians and peons, and to the development of Mexico as a great, modern state. Under Diaz there was also a slow building of a material civilization, looking, in the future, to the filling of the peon stomach and the lifting of the peon mind through education to the light of the white man’s world, to a place in the white man’s commerce. It has been the common usage, in this past decade since Diaz fell, to excoriate that aristocracy, to blame it for all the evils of the country, to point with bitter scorn at its wealth, at its material monuments of churches and palaces and mines and railways. And yet, although these ten years of revolutions have been devoted most effectively to the elimination of the Mexican upper classes and of their materialism and its monuments, the condition of the lower classes has not been alleviated by one tiny burden, nor has it been lifted by one hair’s breadth.

The Mexicans of to-day are worse off than they were in the days of Diaz; they are worse off than in that wild revolutionary period before Diaz; I am not so sure that they are not in worse condition than they were under the Spaniards, for they seem literally to be sliding back to an era of barbarism like only to that misery which was theirs before the Spaniards came.

We lose sight of the essential fact of Mexico, commercially as well as socially, if we lose sight for one moment of the lowest of the Mexican people. They present to us our first and greatest problem, whether we are traders, missionaries, or those who seek to develop Mexico’s resources or to sell her our goods.

It is they who must buy our merchandise or aid our work or operate our factories, mines and oil wells. They were, and are, a vast potential market, a great, slow-moving force for us to re-shape by education into an advanced people, civilized, progressive, using the products of the world and pouring their own products back into the stream of commerce. They offer us an immense, a wonderful well of labor, perhaps a greater contributant to the nation’s future wealth than anything else in all Mexico. Because of these potentialities and because of our inability to understand why such possibilities do not find their development, it is vital that we look, clear-eyed and sympathetically, on the one great and overwhelming factor in that hopeless inertia--the ignorance of the mass of the Mexicans.

Mexico is a land of innumerable children. A land where there are twice as many children under ten years old as there are in the United States (in proportion to population). And a land where not one child in six has even the chance to go to school, because there are no schools for them.

The depth of Mexico’s ignorance, in childhood and in adulthood, in life and in business, literally passes comprehension. The active, curious minds of the Indian youngsters grow quickly into sodden stupidity; the keen and vivid intelligences of the children of the middle and upper classes expend their growing forces in sensuality and plunge themselves and their country into debilitating excesses--because there is no training to give them a life above the animals.

I have seen, in the seats of government in Mexico, men who know less of world history than a boy in an American high school; I have talked with “experts” of government departments who knew less of their special subjects than did I, a layman. I have seen in the presidential chair men who believed, literally, that the shrunken, sick Mexico of to-day was one of the great, advanced countries of the world--because they had no conception of the development of world civilization.

I have seen, in Mexican homes, the slow murder of Mexican babies, because neither I nor any one else could change the round of tradition, unrelieved by training of any sort, which takes an annual toll of child life in Mexico that is perhaps not surpassed even by the toll of the famine in China.

The chain of tradition links Mexico together, and links her, too, to a past which goes back into the furthest reaches of prehistoric legend.

The ways of modern agriculture are those of the early Aztecs, and modern tools, even, are introduced with the greatest difficulty. The round of life is a brief cycle of dull days, unlivened by any thought or knowledge beyond the confines of a village or a township or a few blocks of a city. The schools, such as they are, are patterned after models long abandoned everywhere else in the world, and are stifled by a traditional belief that war and revolution and the erection of imposing buildings are more important to the progress of the country than the education of its youth.

All this has driven Mexico on through the years handicapped with a load of illiteracy that can well be recognized as the most potent factor in the degeneration that marks her every manifestation to-day.

Only figures can tell, even in part, the depths of that ignorance. Back in 1895, the Mexican government reports (which one must always remember speak as favorably as they dare) showed that only 2,000,000 out of a population of 12,500,000 could read and write! This means that 82 per cent of all the people of Mexico were without these rudiments of learning. By 1900 this percentage had been reduced to 80 and in 1910 the Diaz government claimed that it had been reduced to 78, in other words that of the 15,000,000 population of that year, a little over 3,000,000 could read and write, while nearly 12,000,000 remained in the depths of their ignorance. In 1919, the Carranza government issued a report claiming but a slight advance over these figures in the nine years since the fall of Diaz.

It is literally true that not a tenth of all the people in Mexico have what we would call a common school education, and three out of four cannot read a street sign or scrawl their own names. Indeed, one great British mining company reported that of its 595 Mexican employees, including scores of what we would call skilled workmen, only six, or about one per cent could sign a receipt for the money they were paid.

To those of us who look on through foreign eyes, this condition explains much of Mexico’s dilemma, and the point is further clarified when we know that the greatest claim ever made for Mexican education showed but 12,000 schools, with 850,000 pupils enrolled--while the population of children of school age was more than 4,000,000! No single issue is greater or more pressing than education. Yet education waits, as everything in Mexico waits, on peace and better times, on food and on health. And these wait--and more than all, from our selfish interest, business and commerce wait--on education! Around and around the problem swings, and each issue is dependent upon another, and that, then, upon the first.

Of all the complicated, interwoven factors of Mexican life and of the tendencies, this very day, of Mexican business and trade none, however, offers so true an understanding as race. The basis of Mexico’s ignorance and the basis of her steel-bound traditions is Indianism. For Mexico’s 15,000,000 people include 6,000,000 pure-blooded Indians, of some fifty tribal strains, literal aborigines in their life and in their thoughts. There are, as I have noted, 8,000,000 mixed-bloods, three-quarters of whom are virtually Indians in their way of life and in their outlook upon the world. And there are only 1,000,000 of white strain, mostly Spanish, a group which is to-day without voice in the affairs of the country. Two-thirds of Mexico is Indian, and most of the other third a mixture of Indian and white, a mass with the dark Indian sea below it and virtually no light coming to it from above.

To-day there sifts into the Mexican ruling classes--these same mixed-bloods--hardly a ray of culture, hardly a gleam of a truly broader outlook, to lift them and their people out of the dull cavern of their circumscribed life, or to lead them to the better things of modern civilization and commerce. We talk of the heathen of China, of the darkness of ignorance and superstition in Africa, but in Mexico the churches and the foreign industrial concerns seem to me to face a greater need than in any other country in the world.

For Mexico is at our door, and the cultural traditions of Mexico are those of our own world, the white. For 300 years she was a subject state of Spain, and for all the mistakes of the Spaniards and the Roman Catholic Church, the foundation-stones they laid are as the foundation stones of our own life.

The Indian mass was the great problem of Spain; it was the great problem of Diaz; it is the great problem of all those who would lead her to the ways of the world of to-day. For the past ten years it has been forgotten, lost in the struggles of individual men for personal power. But always those individuals have been swallowed up, without their realizing it, in the mire of Indianism, for Indianism, the very epitome of ignorance, lies there always beneath the Mexico that the world sees, waiting to engulf its own masters and to destroy all social and business progress. The Spaniards and Diaz built above these shifting sands, ever conscious of them, providing against them always. Diaz fell because after he built his foundations he did not reach down into the Indian mass to up-raise them. He fell in his old age, forgetting, as old men forget, the dangers which have been with them through all their life. But before he fell he had laid the foundations, building upon those of the Spaniards and erecting new ones of his own, among them foundations of foreign business, of foreign missions, of foreign schools, business and missions and schools which by their own enterprise and perhaps as much by the examples which they set for Mexican business, Catholic churches and native school teachers, were beginning the great uplift of that vast, inert Indian mass.

The brief rule of Madero (1911-1913) was the link between Diaz and the upheaval of radicalism and Indianism which was to begin with Carranza, in 1914. Then commenced the process of casting away, bit by bit, all the slow-built civilization, all the shallow foundations of commercial prosperity, of Diaz. With Carranza began the upsurgence of the Indian, the terrific push upward of the long-hidden forces of destruction which had been held in check, not only for the thirty years of the Diaz peace, but for all the four centuries since the Spaniards had first come to Mexico.

Primarily, this destruction was marked by the wiping out of the fabric of the promising Mexican educational system--for Diaz had made sound beginnings toward raising the Indians out of the depths of their ignorance. His rule was building a foundation for business and for progress by creating an intelligence which would demand and would develop the better things which white civilization had to offer.

Under Carranza the ideal was not of slow uplift by education and the creation of a substantial economic existence which would make life and peace worth striving for. Carranza and those who followed him under the banner of the revolution have thought little of solid progress. Their ideal has been revolution--the political remedy for the economic ills of the land.

So, despite all the sweeping promises of Carranza and his immediate successors, education and the progress of business, of trade and of development have gone into the discard. With the pressure of the needs of the revolutionary “generals” for greater and greater appropriations for their armies (and for the graft which ate up most of such appropriations), with the ever-widening circle of vampires who fattened on government patronage in every other conceivable way, the money available for education as well as for industrial advancement shrank steadily. Where under Diaz the total annual budget of the government was $50,000,000 a year, with a total appropriation for schools, federal and state, probably less than $4,000,000, Carranza had nearer $100,000,000 and spent less than $2,000,000 a year on education. For Carranza, when the demands of his “generals” for their “share” increased, shut off the federal support of the schools of the City of Mexico and its neighboring villages, and also the sums which in other days had gone to help the poorly provided state governments. He threw the school systems on the hands of absolutely bankrupt cities and towns, with the result that in the City of Mexico alone some 120 schools, half the former number, were closed, and 25,000 children, despite crowding into other buildings, were deprived of education. All this is history. And statistics do not show that there has been any recovery since that day.

The Obregon government, on paper, re-established the federal department of education with a cabinet officer at its head, which was abolished by Carranza as an economy measure. There was some more of the endless Mexican discussion of systems of education, but so far as can be found, no increase in appropriations or in plans for better support of the public schools. All those wait, perhaps, as I have said, on the improvement of business conditions, as the final solution of the business problem waits, I believe, upon them.

But they all wait on something else, which I have mentioned above, and that is the improved physical condition of the Mexican people. Comfort, food and health are as important to mental and moral development as the training of the mind by education. The misery of Mexico is so profound, her crashing inertia so deep-rooted and so self-perpetuating, that it sometimes seems that she can never be cured from within herself. Some outside force must break the circle and this I believe is the great opportunity of the American missions, working in conjunction with the great civilizing energies of American business.

Already something has been done, by great American business concerns, and by American trade unions along the northern border and even within Mexico itself, to improve living conditions. But the terrific chasm of the Mexican mass remains utterly unplumbed, and the childhood of Mexico and the manhood and womanhood of Mexico wait, hungry because their food does not feed them; in discomfort because their long traditions do not let them even desire comfort; in sickness because of utter ignorance of the foundations of human health.

Of this last a word must be written here. I have compiled, elsewhere,[4] the astonishing figures bearing upon this question, and have found, in the mass of Mexican official statistics, that the death rate of Mexican babies under one year is nearly twice that of the United States; between birth and ten years, three times that of this country, and that clear through the whole range of Mexican life, from two to four times as many Mexicans die in each thousand as die in the United States at the same ages. The average life of every Mexican born is but 15 years, while in the United States it is about 35 years, and half of the Mexicans born this year will be dead before they are 7 years old, while in the United States half of all the babies born will live to be 42 years old.

High death rate means sickness. Experts estimate that for each death in the United States there are 300 days of severe illness and 6,000 days of indisposition or slight illness, spread over the average 35 years of American life. But in Mexico the average age of death is 15 years, so that the days of sickness must be crowded into less than half the space of time they cover in the United States.

In Mexico, almost no care, as we conceive it, is given to the sick. The government reports show that only one-quarter of all the deaths reported in the country are listed as “classified by the doctor”--in other words, there is no medical attendance at all in three-quarters of all the fatal illnesses in Mexico. It is well known to those who know that unhappy land that in the case of illness, the priest and the doctor are sent for at the same time, the priest to administer extreme unction, the doctor to do what he can with a dying patient.

This factor of ill-health in Mexico is one of the most terrible of all the pictures of her misery, perhaps the most potent element in the national ineptitude. No one who is continually ill can be greatly interested in progress, mental, or moral, or industrial, for illness is the greatest force working against the material advancement of the people and of the country. And upon material advancement, upon the increase of income and the increase of needs physical and cultural (as the money comes to procure them) we must build the solidity of the Mexican people that are to be, as well as the trade which we seek to gain from them.

Out of this picture of darkness, then, comes opportunity and with opportunity the dawning of a new day in Mexico. Because ill health is so great a factor as it is, there is something that we can attack and can conquer. Because education is at the low ebb that it is, there is something which we can do that is direct and tangible, when the means are put into our hands.

There is hope in Mexico, and that hope is tied up with the opportunity for foreign help, which is actually, and even more potentially, the most disinterested and direct force working on conditions in Mexico to-day. The land is so torn by personal politics, so nearly ruined by the exactions of unthinking government, so much the football of well-deserved calumny, that this single ray of clean, clear light can be recognized by all as one of the great hopes in the horizon to-day. That hope must be made to dawn, and it is well for us to consider how that dawn may be assured, and how the day which must follow may be firmly grounded on economic permanence, on social stability and on the comfort, health, education and industrial progress of the Mexican people.

This is the field wherein I believe that the coöperation of the American companies established in Mexico and the American missions operating there will bring about a solution of the ultimate Mexican problem. For the companies, ready and anxious as they appear to be to serve, would, through the missions, find a means wherein their money and the great force of their prestige would have efficient direction. The foreign oil, mining and railway corporations will not hesitate, I believe, to place their resources and their opportunities at the disposal of workers whom they are convinced can truly improve the morale and thus the productive capacity of the workers upon whom their business depends. Heretofore there has been mutual misunderstanding. The companies have not always found the mission workers as efficient as they would like, and the missionaries have been quite ready to suspect the companies of representing “predatory capital” with the ambition, not merely of making their business profitable, but of putting down the “devoted” leaders of the people or of forcing American intervention at once.

I have faith in both the companies and the missionaries, and I believe that in the new political crisis which Mexico is bringing upon herself as this is written (and which she may have tumbling about her ears before it is printed) these two must reach out, and will reach out, to clasp hands and go on together.

Both have done wonderful things for Mexican education, the missions through the conscious development in Mexico of the ideal of education for service, and to the end of raising and training leaders for the Mexican masses, and the companies through isolated examples of truly constructive welfare and educational work.

Probably the most outstanding example of the educational achievements of American corporations was that of the trade schools which were organized and operated by the National Railroad between 1890 and 1912, under the direction of E. N. Brown, president of the National Railways--one of the “pernicious foreigners” who were exiled under Carranza’s “nationalization” of the railway properties in 1914. These railway schools trained between 15,000 and 18,000 Mexican mechanics and engineers, taking boys of 14 and 15, paying them first 62 cents a day and gradually increasing that until, after four years’ training, they were receiving three and a half pesos a day. They were then ready to take positions as skilled workers in the railway shops or on the locomotives or, if they chose, in other industries. The railway placed no limitation on them, holding that the company benefited in the increase of the efficiency of the Mexican worker wherever he might be.

The whole scheme of this work, including the paying of apprentices while learning, was the broadest kind of educational service, taken up, to be sure, because the railway company needed mechanics and trainmen, but with an effect on Mexico and on the creation of the so-called Mexican “middle class” (the buying and building as well as the elevating element in any population) which is still felt through the chaos of revolutionary destruction.

To-day the greatest industry of Mexico is the production and refining of petroleum, and foreign companies, of course, control it. Much genuinely helpful welfare work is being done by them, including not only schools for children but training schools for workers as well. In addition the very conscious plan of increasing wages until unskilled labor now receives a minimum of $2 a day is having a remarkable effect upon the standard of living and upon the buying capacity (as well as upon the efficiency) of the Mexicans of the Tampico oil section. There is much undigested prosperity, and agitators are creating trouble as far as they can for the foreigners, but on the whole the effect on the material well-being of the peon has been advantageous. It is inevitable that a continuation of this attitude should bring forth a vastly increased civilization at least in this one section of Mexico.

Education has been pushed forward by the companies, and in the model villages such as the town of Terminal (across the river from Tampico on the property of the Doheny companies) really excellent schools are maintained with Mexican teachers under American supervision.

Conditions in the oil country outside the private company towns are, however, deplorable, presenting a contrast which is not without its mighty lesson for us all. The graft and incompetence of the present ruling classes of Mexico have regarded the prosperous oil towns only as the most luxurious of posts for influential favorites. The educational conditions of Tampico, where in a city of more than 100,000 people there are only twenty government primary schools with an attendance of 4,500 pupils, beggars description. Yet the foreign companies have been called on regularly to support the Tampico schools, just as they are called on to pay for pavements, sanitation, etc. And this money has gone, hardly a single dollar into the work for which it was collected, but countless thousands into the bottomless pit of revolutionary graft.

But for all the unfortunate conditions of the moment, the possibilities of the foreign corporations aiding in the uplift of the Mexican mass throughout the country is one of the encouraging phases of the Mexican trade and business problem. It links up definitely with the solution (on which we shall touch, in later chapters) of the parts of the question which deal with other elements than the human equation. The beginning which has been made in Tampico, chiefly by the great American companies, carries with it an import far greater than the mere contrast between their trim little company villages and schools and the ugly squalor of the Mexican towns. Somehow, out of the dark present, American business has learned how closely it is linked with the welfare of the human element in its scheme. They have learned how the simple man, how his happiness and prosperity, are wrapped up with the prosperity and success of every enterprise which remotely touches him.

Until these recent years, and through these American corporations, there has never been scientific welfare work in Mexico, there has never been considerate treatment of the workers, little study of their weaknesses and their needs. If we contemplate that, in its bare truth, we can begin to understand something of the importance of even the relatively little work which has been done of late. Perhaps the greatest potentiality of the future of the human side of the Mexican market lies in the broad extension of that genuinely American attitude toward the masses of the country.

I have advocated the union of the forces of American missionaries and American corporations in Mexico. I believe that this will bring great good and will eventually, as it has done in this country, bring a higher efficiency of labor and a larger market for the things which this country can export to Mexico. The desertion of the masses by the revolutionary government and the exile of the natural aristocracy, have brought the human problem of the country home with tremendous force to the foreigners. It lies to-day almost solely in their hands, and seems likely to wait long for a rescue or aid from any other source whatever.

For the missionaries, education and improved economic conditions amongst the workers is indispensable--they are the tools and the signs of their great plan of regeneration. For business, the encouragement of religion and education which the mission schools give promises that improvement in the laboring population and in the buying capacity of that population which is demanded by the advancement of their business. Somehow that buying population which I have set at 3,000,000 must be increased. Somehow the efficiency of the laboring group (which numbers little more than the buying public) must be increased. Only one way is open--to make the masses better men, happier men, more cultured men. The ignorance of Mexico, the inefficiency which results from that ignorance, the low standard of living which keeps the people from those “wants” which make luxuries into necessities and so improve trade by widening the eddies of demand--all these affect us all in Mexico.

Trade follows education. It follows the missionaries of business and of religion. It thrives alone on the prosperity of peoples. To-day these factors of trade in Mexico are only depressants--in the future they must and surely will be changed slowly into booming creators of trade. But so long as the chief item of import is food and so long as the productive capacity of the Mexicans is only half developed, so long will the market in Mexico swing at its lowest ebb.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] _The People of Mexico._ Mexican health is treated directly in the chapter on “Vitality,” pp. 86-109, and indirectly in the chapter on “Climate,” pp. 131-151.