is furnished free by the railways to men employed by themselves and at reduced party rates to other employers. Besides this the agent has to provide subsistence to destination, an amount varying from less than a dollar to $3 or $4 in case of long journeys. This subsistence and paid railway fares are charged to the laborer's account and repaid by him from wages. The distance that a laborer may be sent varies from a few miles to 2,000 miles. One of the larger firms had sent Mexican laborers to different railroads, during eight months of 1907, as follows: To the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway, 3,523; to the El Paso and Southwestern System, 1,593; to the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, 973; and to the Pecos Valley and Northeastern Railway, 421.

Along the Texas border, and even in the larger labor centers, are men who secure laborers in small numbers for cotton and beet planters and other minor employers. Some of these recruiters are themselves hardly above the laboring class, and several are Mexicans or Spanishspeaking Americans. It is not unusual for a group of planters in northwestern Texas or Oklahoma, or a beet sugar company in Colorado, to send a manager or foreman to the Rio Grande to gather up a party of 100 or more men and their families, and some parties are taken even as far east as the Mississippi. But as a rule farmers and planters prefer to get laborers by offering higher wages than the railroads, thus drawing men from the sections and saving for themselves railway fare and the other expenses of recruiting.

In Mexico itself the "enganchadores" work principally among the city and tramp labor population, partly because in many country districts hostile sentiment and legislation make open recruiting dangerous. The "enganchados," as these recruited laborers are called, are not considered good workers by Mexican employers, and have the reputation of being mostly broken-down city workmen and loafers. Possibly they do not emigrate. American labor agents seem to think that men specially recruited from Mexico are better than those picked up by chance along the border. Possibly the recruiting for the American labor market is largely secret, and therefore conducted with more success in country districts and among a 、more reliable class of workmen than the labor drummed up openly for local enterprises.

The progress of the laborer from his home in interior Mexico to his place of work in the United States is therefore in two main stages; first, as a recruit he is taken, or as a free immigrant he works his way, to the border. At this point he falls into the hands of the labor agent, who passes him along to his final destination. The first stage of the journey may or may not be paid for by the laborer himself; the second is in practically all cases at the expense of the employer.

OCCUPATIONS IN WHICH MEXICANS ARE EMPLOYED.

RAILWAY LABORERS.

With the possible exception of agriculture at certain seasons, more Mexicans are employed in the United States as railway laborers than at any other occupation. It is from this occupation that they drift into other lines of work.

Mexicans are distributed as railway laborers over practically all of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. They are the main labor employed on the railroads of California as far north as Fresno, in southern Nevada, and in Colorado, and on some Colorado lines into Wyoming; also, they are working in increasing numbers along the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway through Kansas, Missouri, and even into Chicago and to central Iowa.

In Mexico native labor now does practically everything on a railroad except operate fast trains, superintend construction and administration, and do more responsible shopwork. In the United States this labor is confined to track maintenance-usually under American or European foremen-and construction, and employment as extra and yard gangs. There are many Mexican section bosses scattered throughout the Southwest, and their number is likely to increase.

The reasons for the growing use of Mexican labor in these occupations are that it is cheap and docile; but these qualities alone would not give it favor were it not also fairly efficient. Employers and foremen do not differentiate the various motives that induce them to prefer a certain kind of labor, but they are usually perfectly clear as to the order of choice among different nationalities.

A trackmaster who had worked various kinds of labor in southern Kansas said: "Mexicans are better than Greeks or Italians, and next to the American 'hobo.' They must be well fed, and want fresh beef and mutton, but don't eat so much pork. They don't have feuds and disorders like the Italians, who are always fighting unless the whole gang is from the same town in Italy. We send a man every spring to the Rio Grande to get our men for the summer. We have to keep our engagements with them, or we can't get any men the next year. Though they are used to low pay at home, they want as much as anybody when they get to this country." A Texas railway official said: "We have worked Mexicans out of El Paso for several years, and since 1903 have substituted them for Italians-who were disorderlyand for Negroes in northern Texas, nearly to Texarkana. They suit us better than any other immigrant labor we can get. They are better than Negroes at ballasting, laying ties, and ordinary track work; but the Negroes can beat them laying rails, and will work better long hours or at rush jobs, as in case of washouts or getting a track around

a wreck. Our chief difficulties are due to ignorance of the language, and to the rough ways of our foremen-who sometimes frighten the Mexicans so they won't work. Mexicans are not very regular, and we have to carry about 50 men on a pay roll to be sure of 30 to 35 men working every day."

A large labor contractor, who is also an employer, said: "I have not found Mexican laborers irregular on section work. They often average about twenty-five days a month. Some stay on the same section seven or eight years. Much depends on the foreman. I can tell the character of a section boss by the number of new men he wants. Some never need new men, because their old hands stay with them, and if any leave, others come from neighboring sections. I know good Mexican section foremen."

A road master in southern California said the Mexicans had been employed in his division four or five years and were displacing other labor. He preferred them to other laborers obtainable, especially to the Japanese. "When you have occasion to discharge one Japanese all would quit, and so you are left without men. But if a Mexican proves a poor or undesirable workman, you can let him go without breaking up the whole gang."

A railway contractor in Los Angeles expressed the same preference for the Mexican as compared with the Japanese, and said the latter could not be trusted to carry out a job just as directed, but that the Mexican was careful to do exactly as he was told. There was not a single instance in which men in actual touch with railroad labor did not give the Mexican the preference over either Japanese or Greek; but one manager stated that he would prefer Japanese, because they were more intelligent.

An objection to the Greeks, as stated by one contractor, was that they would submit to graft. On one system where Greeks were employed section bosses made them pay a dollar a month for their jobs, and shared the labor agents' fees when new men were brought on. The result was that the foremen, practically in the pay of their own workmen, lost authority over them, and the latter soldiered and neglected their work. Mexicans, it is said, will not submit to exactions of this kind, and this is a chief cause why they have lately been given a preference on the road in question.

No instances were discovered where the wages of section hands were less than $1 a day in 1907, although in previous years men may have worked for 75 and 80 cents in some places near the frontier. Shop laborers at Laredo, Tex., received 75 cents in 1906 and $1 in 1907. In addition to day wages, the men are given the use of huts or bunk A short distance north from the border the rate of pay rises to $1.25 a day, and this is generally the wage along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Chicago, Rock Island and

cars.

Pacific Railway north of Texas. They received $1.40 and $1.50 a day in Kansas. In northern Texas section hands were paid $1.15 in 1907, and were paid $1 previously. In northern Arizona the rate had risen from $1 to $1.25 within a year or eighteen months. On the line of the Southern Pacific Company, near Bakersfield, Cal., the following rates were said to be in force for ordinary section hands: Greeks, $1.60; Japanese, $1.45, and Mexicans, $1.25 a day. Foremen said that the Mexicans did as much work as men of either of the other nationalities, and that the discrimination in wages was due to arbitrary orders issued from headquarters by men who had no practical knowledge of the efficiency of different kinds of laborers.

Extra gangs are paid higher wages, partly because it is often necessary for them to board in camps, instead of receiving rations, which makes their cost of living higher. Mexicans of this class were paid as high as $1.75 a day on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway, in Texas, during the cotton-picking season of 1907. This high wage was partly to keep them away from the farmers. However, $1.50 is not an unusual wage for Mexican extra men. Upon one railway in central and eastern Texas section hands were paid, in the summer of 1907, $1 and board, or $1.50 when they boarded themselves. This matter of board is not always left to the choice of the laborer. If he lives in a section house or hut at a station or section headquarters and is permanently located on one section, he usually has an opportunity to board himself; but if his work requires him to shift from section to section, and he lives in bunk cars, he is usually boarded. The character of the board depends upon local conditions, but testimony was general to the effect that railroads fed their men better than the men fed themselves. The houses provided for section men are very primitive in most cases, frequently being single-room adobe huts or cabins built of condemned ties set vertically with a roof of boards covered with earth, and a clay floor. Often there are no glass windows. These houses are as good as the laborer occupied in Mexico and seem to be adapted to his mode of living.

As he goes northward the section hand encounters a more severe climate, but, to compensate for this, higher wages and better housing. In Oklahoma, during the summer of 1907, scattering Mexicans were employed at $1.50 a day, or the same wages paid Europeans. A gang of Mexicans worked near Fredonia, Iowa, until January 20, 1907, without apparent suffering. This was attributed to good food and warm houses.

In order to hold labor at lower wages the railroads give Mexicans return transportation to El Paso, if they have worked regularly three months. This applies to all railroads entering El Paso itself, but probably not to smaller lines and those distant from the frontier.

At the shops of the National Railroad of Mexico, in Laredo, common labor is paid $1 (gold) a day. Until last year, when there was a strike, they were paid 75 cents a day. The present wage of these laborers is about four times that paid in similar occupations in central Mexico.

FARM LABORERS.

The Mexican immigrant has been in most cases an agricultural laborer in his own country, and, though his experience at home has given him little familiarity with American farming methods, it is to this occupation in the United States that he turns most readily when the opportunity offers. Cotton and corn, the staple crops of the States where Mexicans are most numerous in this country, are both cultivated extensively in Mexico. Stock raising is a great industry on both sides of the boundary line. In this industry the Mexicans, many of whom were born north of the border, have excelled for a long period. They are now found as shepherds, cowboys, and "broncho busters" as far north as Wyoming. But the main importance of Mexican labor in agriculture is during the harvest season in the cotton fields. Cotton picking suits the Mexican for several reasons: It requires nimble fingers rather than physical strength, in which he can not compete with the white man or the Negro; it employs his whole family; he can follow it from place to place, living out of doors, which seems to suit the half-subdued nomadic instinct of a part of the Mexican race; it is a seasonal occupation, fitting in conveniently with the demands of labor and leisure in his own country, and it is well paid, and paid by the piece.

In Texas and in Oklahoma cotton is raised by prairie farming methods, with more extensive use of machinery than farther east, where soil and climate, and the cotton itself, are different. In these two States a white farmer can raise more cotton than several families can pick in proper season, in the same way that the Kansas farmers can raise more wheat in normal years than the resident labor of the State can harvest. So the man with 40 or 80 acres of cotton opening secures two or three families of Mexicans that migrate from the southward at this season, camp in an outhouse or in their canvastopped carts, and pick the fields clean, then move on northward to where the crop is just maturing.

Pickers are paid from 50 cents to $1 a hundred pounds in the seed. Two or three hundred pounds is a fair day's work, though under favorable conditions 400 pounds are sometimes gathered. Children often pick as much as adults, so that a man with a family can earn $5 or more a day during the height of the season.

In Texas Mexicans are employed throughout the year on onion and vegetable farms and as tenants or hired cultivators on cotton and rice plantations. Their home experience makes them very good