Long servitude has obliterated every feeling of independence from the minds of these Indians.  Their fathers were slaves, and they are quite content to be so too.  Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not let him starve.  They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico, is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.

There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these peons to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does not give us a right to judge of its working.  We can but compare the opinions of waiters who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery.  Sartorius, however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must take the only security they can get.  He says, and truly enough, that the system works wretchedly both for masters and labourers.  Any one who knows the working of the common English system of allowing workmen to run into debt with the view of retaining them permanently in their master’s service may form some faint idea of the way in which this Mexican debt-slavery destroys the energy and self-reliance of the people.

But in one essential particular Sartorius mis-states the case.  It is not the money which the masters lend the peons to help them in distress and sickness that keeps them in slavery.  It is the money spent in wax-candles and rockets, and such like fooleries, for Easter and All Saints; in the reckless profusion of drunken feasts on the days of their patron saints, and on the occasion of births, deaths, and marriages.  These feasts are as utterly disproportioned to the means of the givers as the Irish wakes which reduce whole families to beggary.  The sums of money spent upon them are provided by the owners of the estates, who know exactly how they are to be spent.  If they preferred that their labourers should be free from debt, they could withhold this money; and their not doing so proves that it is their desire to keep the peons in a state of slavery, and throws the whole blame of the system upon them.

I have spoken of the peons as Indians, and so they are for the most part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,—­not merely brown Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.