Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 February 1917 — Agricultural Democracy Will Arise in Mexico if U. S. Keeps Its Hands Off [ARTICLE]

Agricultural Democracy Will Arise in Mexico if U. S. Keeps Its Hands Off

By A. E. WOODRUFF

- -The revolutions of Mexico are awaking the Peons —giving them power of arms —and in a few years Mexico will arise out of its present feudal state into an agricultural democracy. There are 12,000.009 peons of the Aztec blood, 85 per cent of the population, and they are now’ conscious of their power. They learned it in war, and nothing can prevent them from asserting themselves and claiming the land that is theirs. Now* there is no middle class, There is great wealth on one side — and that mostly foreign —and great poverty on the other. The peons have been actual serfs, ground into dust until the revolutions started, but - now tliew have felt freedom, and no longer look to one man as a liberator, but are beginning to look to themselves. • The feeling 6? power is growing, and in not many years we shall ■see in Mexico a land of strength, based on agrarian democracy. In Xucatan wonderful progress has been made toward developing a middle class. The south of Mexico has been at peace longer than any other part. ’ * Yupatan is practically .owned by 40 lords, who formerly forced the peons to do all the work on the estates. Sisal is the principal product. Now the laborers demand as much as $1 American money a day, and • get it, or else they rent land- an d pay a -part -of the erop as- Ten tai -ea<-h year. i . a The sisal lords are no longer rulers but are employers. In time the northern part of Mexico will advance as far, and the beginning of a wonderful, rich, powerful democracy will be laid. —- . - Interference of the United States in Mexico would be unwarranted, and, to my mind, criminal. A nation has a soul just as an individual has, apd the nation must work out its own salvation. American capital is causing all the so-called border troubles in an effort to have the Enited States annex Mexico.