munal standard of living is apt to be low, because emulative influences are absent. In the United States, for instance, the standard of living constantly rises, partly because every man wants to excel or at least equal his neighbor in home surroundings. And other things being the same, the standard of living rises most rapidly where there is the most social contact, as in towns and in cities, provided each family unit is upon an independent basis. But where the man who increases his family expenditure, at once, by this evidence of prosperity, becomes the prey of all his poorer relatives and connections, and even neighbors, who swarm in and eat up his surplus substance, obviously there can be little progress, though there is a comfortable condition of equality among all members of the community. This was the condition of the Mexican villagers. Custom made the more industrious and efficient the victims of the lazy and inefficient. There was no incentive to accumulate. Society was reduced to a subsistence basis. With emigration the communal unit is broken up, and there is an opportunity to accumulate and enjoy the fruit of this accumulation. The conditions under which the Mexican laborer in the United States works usually prevent his having a home; so he does not buy furniture. But he spends liberally for clothing, and if his family accompanies him, provides well for his wife and children. He thus accustoms himself to things he has not heretofore enjoyed, and carries the taste for these things back to Mexico. New demands for American manufactures grow up in Mexico where the returned emigrant has settled, and trade follows in the wake of retreating labor.

It is the general opinion that Mexican immigrants eat better and more varied food in the United States than at home, but their diet in the United States is so different under different conditions that a safe conclusion can not be drawn from observing isolated cases. A person who had lived among Mexicans in Mexico and in Colorado said: "Both immigrants and American-born Mexicans eat chilis and beans and jerk their meat. But in Old Mexico people have a greater variety of food, because it is so easily procured." This applies especially to fruits and to vegetables, which are fairly abundant and varied, though of poor quality, at least in the markets of the larger provincial towns of Mexico. At a Colorado coal mine store a typical bill of a New Mexican was 4 sacks of flour, Mexican beans, canned goods (tomatoes, corn, and peas), a 15-pound bucket of jelly, 20 pounds of lard, chilis, corn meal, and about $3 worth of fresh boiling beef and bacon. This represents about the best dietary scale of Spanish-speaking laborers, where they board themselves. Some items are omitted or were obtained elsewhere. Compared with this is the following weekly ration of a "family "(a) on a plantation in the extreme southern portion of Mexico, where wages are high for

"A man, wife, and children too young to work.

the Republic and labor scarce: 1 kilos (3.3 pounds) beans, 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) rice, 600 grams (1.3 pounds) coffee, kilo (1.1 pounds) salt, 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) brown sugar, 3 kilos (6.6 pounds) meat, one-half bottle lard, one-half bottle kerosene. At Flagstaff, Ariz., a Mexican said that men boarding themselves paid $4 or $5 a month for a house, usually occupied by two or more, and bought flour, beans, sugar, and coffee, but no meat and very little of other provisions. At a railway store in California immigrant Mexicans were buying bacon, ham, flour, beans, and some canned goods. Where they are boarded, as remarked elsewhere, they eat a great deal of fresh meat. One contractor said of his Old Mexicans: "They gorge themselves on meat."

A merchant dealing with both New Mexicans and immigrant Mexicans said: "Mexicans born in this country are usually neat about their homes and buy things to make them comfortable. They will own a $35 bed, though they sleep out of doors in summer. I sell on an average one good kitchen range a month to Mexicans in this community of some 500 people. They have crayon enlargements in their houses. They don't use much table linen; they use oilcloth. They like gaudily colored table covers and pottery ornaments." Old Mexicans buy a cheaper quality of goods and in smaller quantities than New Mexicans; and all Mexicans, though better buyers, use cheaper articles than Italians, and buy them with less discrimination. Italians will pay 40 cents a pound for Edam cheese, and correspondingly higher prices for the best imported olive oil and macaroni, if the articles are really as represented, but Mexicans buy better clothing, especially for their women and children. Young Americans of Mexican descent buy tailor-made clothing, but older New Mexicans and immigrants will seldom pay more than $10 for a readymade suit. The wives of Mexican miners and laborers will buy more expensive hats and shoes than American women of a much better position in life. Sewing machines have found their way into Mexican homes throughout the Southwest. The returning immigrant often invests a considerable share of his savings in attire for himself and family before reaching home.

EMIGRATION AND LABOR EFFICIENCY.

The new sense of self-dependence created by migration is said to be both a moral and an industrial stimulus to the Mexican, and does not leave him even when he returns to his own country. Several employers in Mexico expressed, independently of each other, the opinion that the laborer who had been to the United States was a better worker than the one who had never left home. Some thought that the old-time peon, who had never left his village, was more tractable and could be driven more; but that the laborer educated by

travel across the border had more initiative and intelligence, and more need for money, so that his real efficiency was higher, though his habits were more irregular. The testimony of employers who had had an opportunity to observe labor in both countries, was unanimous that Mexicans worked better in the United States than in Mexico; that they learned to direct their work more intelligently, worked more days a month, and worked with more vigor. This was attributed partly to American superintendence, partly to higher wages and better food, and partly to the fact that the Mexican came to the United States with the definite object of saving money to carry back home, and gave his attention to that one thing.

One railway manager qualified his opinion of the influence of emigration upon the labor efficiency of Mexicans as follows: "Their efficiency is not increased by higher wages. They do not do so much as five years ago. But those who have been in the United States are in some respects cheaper, because they need less supervision." Another employer, with more men in his service, summed up the matter by saying of laborers who had come back to Mexico to work, after being in the United States: "We get more service for more wages.' The general educational effect of travel upon the Mexican peons is probably wholesome. They learn to do new kinds of work, under new conditions. They see different ways of living and acquire new wants. They begin to have a vague ambition for social and economic betterment. It is so usual in Mexico to speak of the Indian laborer as absolutely without ambition, that to attribute to him this quality marks a man in common opinion as a theorist. But the very movement of this labor northward is a proof of ambition. These workers are not forced from their homes-they leave against opposition of their old employers, those whom they have been taught to respect and obey. Sometimes they leave against the will of the priest as well as of the patron;" for there is often solidarity of interest between the two in rural parishes. The attraction that overcomes this opposition is therefore a strong one-and it is none other than the motive that sets the European immigrant upon his way across the sea-to earn more money and to live better. Some educated Mexicans say that the laborers of their country are beginning to be restless under the old caste inferiority, to which they have submitted from before the Conquest; that doctrines of equality, but half comprehended, are awakening new ideas among the peasantry, and that the movement among them to the north is partly a groping for an opportunity to rise out of their hereditary condition. A mere grain of truth may be at the bottom of this opinion, but it is mostly the idealism of educated social optimists, read into the extremely simple and practical mind of the Indian, who aspires mostly for very concrete things. The peon immigrant has an ambition; but it is limited to the few dollars which he

can carry back to his family and often dissipate in gorgeous expenditure. Still, this ambition is better than none at all; and it results in labor, which is discipline, and in saving, which is a still higher and less familiar discipline to these people. Ultimately it brings about a higher standard of living, which is the basis for social aspirations, such as overhopeful Mexicans already feign to discover among their peon classes.

This primary desire for money, even if the money is to be spent unwisely, makes the Mexican a better worker. His efficiency as a laborer is rising slowly to the demands of the gold-paying employer in the United States. As he acquires more varied experience, his initiative and adaptability increase. When it is considered that he is the product of unnumbered generations of training in a single occupation-in the simplest of all labor, primitive and unprogressive agriculture—it is not to be expected that he should respond readily to all the varied demands of modern industry. The important point is that he improves, "catches on," as the foremen say.

SOCIAL CONDITION OF MEXICANS IN THE UNITED

STATES.

The Spanish-speaking population of the United States has not increased rapidly, and in localities where it is brought into close competition with other races appears to be decreasing. But the population of Mexico has more than doubled within one hundred years, without appreciable immigration. The number of inhabitants in the Republic at present probably exceeds 15,000,000. The race has not been as prolific in Mexico as either the white or the black race in the United States. This has probably been due not so much to a lower birth rate as to a higher death rate, caused by poorer sanitary conditions and less nourishing food. Mexicans are fatalists in case of epidemics, exposing themselves to contagion without regard to consequences. They are said to be susceptible to tuberculosis. While they do not impress one as able to resist the stress of modern urban life, they literally swarm in the crowded, insanitary courts of the City of Mexico.

Physicians familiar with Mexican immigrants in the United States usually speak of them as poorly nourished, with less vigor and resistance to disease than Europeans, Negroes, or Americans. A mine physician said: "Mexicans in this country have fairly large families, but the population resident here increases but slowly, if at all, on account of the low resistance powers of the race." Parasitic anæmia, or the "hook worm," is not the cause of this, apparently, since the disease is unknown in many parts of Mexico and not common among the immigrants. There are a few cases in coal mines near the border, all popularly supposed to be brought from a single mining district of Mexico, and to be due to the habit of earth-eating said to prevail

in that locality. Speaking of Mexican communities in Colorado, a person familiar with them said: "New Mexicans have large families, but seem to be dying out; and the Mexican population of Pueblo and Trinidad appears to be decreasing, and would decrease more were it not for immigration from the south." There are no statistics to show whether or not this surmise is correct. The American population of these western towns and cities is growing so rapidly, and the country is filling up so fast with European immigrants, that the so-called "Mexican " population, while really growing, may by contrast appear to be lessening; also, the New Mexicans are more widely distributed than formerly, entering new occupations and old occupations in a country that was entirely without settlers a few years ago. Therefore a local decrease might accompany a general increase throughout the State, or in neighboring States. At one place in Colorado an election official said that the poll books showed a decreasing Mexican population. But such evidence has no value for general purposes. In Los Angeles immigrant Mexicans are said to be more robust than natives of Mexican descent, and to be displacing them. The impression of Americans here and in the Territories accords with the opinions given from Colorado, that the American-born Mexicans are a decadent race, yielding before the physically more vigorous immigrants from Europe and the East. One cause given for the decline of the New Mexican population is inbreeding-intermarriage for generations among the few families of a village, said to result in stunting and deformities and in a general decrease of virility.

Los Angeles has probably the largest urban colony of immigrant Mexicans in the United States. The total Spanish-speaking population of the city is said not to be increasing, but natives are being supplanted by immigrants, so that in a district in the old Spanish town, where there are still many hundreds of Mexicans, a social settlement worker knew of but four families that were born in this country. These people live in courts and in alleys, into which open one-story huts having one or two rooms, built of wood or brick and adobe, weatherproof, but ill-lighted, unclean, unwholesome, and hardly to be tolerated by the poorest except in the sunny and warm California climate. Not long ago a physician found 23 Mexicans sleeping in one small room in this district, and another was added to the number before he left. These courts harbor not only Mexicans, but Negroes and Slavs as well. Families of different race and nationality occupy adjoining tenements. There is nothing to distinguish the house of one from the other, except that a box of flowers occasionally is seen in front of the Mexican quarters. Single-room huts rent for $3 a month, and this rate per room is charged for larger tenements. On account of a recent tenement house ordinance in Los 56749-No. 78-08- -7