irrigators. For the cultivation of onions they are paid by the hundred. Wages on farms in southeastern Texas are about $15 a month, the Mexican receiving shelter, but boarding himself. Wages, except during the very busy seasons, are about 60 cents a day. Mexicans are good grubbers, and are about the only laborers employed to clear the south Texas ranches of mesquite brush prior to cultivation. They do this work under contract by the acre, rates varying with the neighborhood and the amount of brush growing on the land. Near the lower Rio Grande ranch hands and shepherds are paid less. A Mexican interviewed had relatives working on a ranch near Laredo for $8 a month and rations; but this was less than is commonly paid in the vicinity. In the country districts on both sides of the border Mexican money is current, and not many years ago it was not unusual to pay the wages of herders in this coin. Mexican shepherds in Lasalle County, Tex., were paid $12 (Mexican currency) a month and a ration of coffee, beans, corn meal, salt, and goat meat.

Within two or three years wages have risen rapidly in the part of Texas dependent upon Mexican ranch and farm labor. A farmer in Ward County, near the western border of the State, said that in 1903 Mexican farm hands could still be hired for 50 and 75 cents a day, American currency, but that in 1907 they were paid $1 and $1.25 a day, and even higher. White farm labor commands $1.75 and $2 a day in the same country.

In Kansas and in northern Oklahoma many Mexicans now leave railway gangs to work in the grain fields during the harvest season. Contractors estimate that nearly one-third leave them for this reason.

In the vicinities of Rocky Ford and Sugar City, Colo., in the valley of the upper Arkansas, sugar beet cultivation has extended rapidly within the past seven years, and there are now six large factories operating in this district. Here immigrants from Old Mexico compete with New Mexicans, Russians, and Japanese in the beet and the melon fields. New Mexican laborers have been employed since 1900, but Old Mexicans have come in more recently. The latter have not displaced other laborers to the same extent as on the railways, but seem to have held their own without difficulty. (a)

The beet factories own considerable land, which they cultivate either directly or through tenants; but they depend chiefly upon neighboring farmers for their supply of beets. The farmers raise under contract with the factories and their crop is financed partly by the manufacturers. The sugar companies also bring in what labor is needed from outside, assuring men an opportunity to earn 15 cents

a For convenience the term "Old Mexicans is used in this article to designate persons of Mexican descent born in Mexico, and "New Mexicans to designate those of Mexican descent born in the United States, and mainly in New Mexico.

an hour. They advance railway fare from El Paso-about $9.50 for each adult. Prices for contract work are the same for all nationalities, but Indian schoolboys from New Mexico have been brought in to work by the hour and are somewhat cheaper than other workers. However, on account of school duties, they work only in the spring. The contract price for thinning beets is about $7 an acre, though it may range anywhere from $6 to $8. Beets are topped by the ton, the usual rate being 50 cents. A crop runs from 15 to 25 tons per acre. Japanese usually try to secure at least 15 acres to thin and top, but Mexicans will take less. Between the thinning and the topping season many Mexicans work in the melon fields at from 15 to 20 cents an hour, or find employment on the railway at $1.25 to $1.30 a day. The consensus of opinion among a number of beet growers was that Russians made the best laborers, both for the farmer and for the country, because they were better workers and ultimately bought land and became citizens. There was a less decided disposition to prefer Japanese to Mexicans, but the laborer from Old Mexico was generally preferred to the Spanish-speaking laborer from New Mexico as being both a more regular and a more reliable hand. At some mills Mexicans are preferred to Japanese. An attempt has been made, by building an adobe village, to hold the Mexicans as permanent settlers in the vicinity of the Swink factory.

The chief complaints against the Mexicans are that they are not reliable in observing their contracts and will not work regularly. The first brought into the country, about 1900, were driven out by hostile workingmen and farmers, but this sentiment against them is said to have disappeared. In competition with other and constantly more varied nationalities they are not increasing, or increase but slowly. In 1907 Koreans began to be employed-displacing principally the Japanese-and the temporary immigration of some 600 Indian laborers satisfied a demand that had formerly been filled by Mexicans. But immigrants from Old Mexico are displacing New Mexicans, and they continue to be more numerous than workers of any other nationality. Meantime, they are finding new fields of employment in kindred occupations elsewhere. Recently they have been shipped to some extent to the Greeley, Colo., potato country, where Europeans and Japanese have been the only imported labor employed heretofore.

In the irrigated sections of New Mexico and of Arizona local Spanish-speaking laborers, supplemented by some Mexicans from across the border, are employed in raising vegetables and alfalfa and other forage crops. When an attempt was made recently to establish sugar beet cultivation in the Salt River valley, Arizona, Japanese were brought in to raise this crop; but the enterprise failed, and the Japanese have left, not competing with Mexican laborers-who are

paid as high as $2 a day at certain seasons-in other lines of farming and in ranching.

Mexicans are employed by fruit growers, sugar beet raisers, and general farmers in southern California; but in this State they are not relatively so important a source of rural labor supply as they are in Texas. Nevertheless the more extensive employment of Mexicans by the railroads is likely to result in their being used more by the farmers, who secure hands from railway gangs. Farm wages in southern California are very high, in many places not less than $2 for good men, and this wage attracts a considerable supply of American labor.

From Texas, Mexicans have been taken east as far as the Mississippi River, and a few gangs of cotton pickers have been tried even in the Yazoo Delta, but with only partial success. The employment of Mexicans on cane plantations, already tried experimentally, may increase, more particularly during the harvest season; but they are not likely to be employed as mill laborers, and so far as could be learned have never been used in beet sugar factories.

The main value of the Mexican in agriculture is as a temporary worker in crops where the season is short, especially in harvesting cotton, grain, and sugar beets. Mexicans are not likely to be employed the year round by small farmers, because they are not entertained in the family like American, German, Scandinavian, or Irish laborers of the North. Yet they do not occupy a position analogous to that of the Negro in the South. They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish themselves in little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and outside of American civilization.

MINE LABORERS.

Mexicans have become in a way the scavengers of the mining industry, picking up the positions left vacant by other classes of workers, and supplanting the least skilled and reliable Europeans and Asiatics. They mine both coal and metal at different places, especially in small mines with shallow workings, and are extensively employed as muckers and surface men. The Mexican is a fairly good man for development work, or for cheap mining undertakings where a poor or a penurious company wishes to "rat hole " a property; that is, work out the ore without scientific development or expert engineering advice. In Old Mexico native miners are employed exclusively in deep and dangerous workings that would try the skill of experienced white labor. Mining is in parts of that country almost a hereditary occupation with a certain class of workers; but miners of this kind either stay at home or else do not form a sufficiently important element in the Spanish-speaking mine popula

tion of the American border States and Territories to raise the general character of this labor.

In the copper and silver mines of New Mexico and of Arizona, American and Cornish miners are employed, with considerable numbers of Italians and Slavs, who are both miners and laborers. The latter two nationalities predominate in the coal mines. American Negroes are sometimes employed as hostlers and mule men, but are rarely miners. In the larger camps, and in small camps connected with important properties, union labor is used. The Mexican supplements all these other kinds of labor. He will be found mining copper and silver-that is, using drill and powder-in some new mine opened in a new district, to the entire exclusion of white labor, yet later, if the property proves valuable, he may be supplanted wholly by skilled American miners. In a district where white labor is chiefly used a few Mexicans will sometimes be found in smaller and less profitable workings. In most border districts large gangs of Mexican surface men, wood choppers, and often muckers are encountered. There are large mining centers-as at Fierro, Silver City, and San Antonio, N. Mex., where coal and iron as well as other metals are mined that use Mexican labor mainly, stripping and in shafts and drifts. This mingling of Mexican and white labor, without either supplanting the other entirely, comes from an equilibrium of competitive conditions, due to the general scarcity of labor, the extensive development now occurring, and the easy adjustment of the wage of the Mexican to his true worth. The rates paid white miners. are standardized by custom and by union regulations and range from $3 to $5 a day. Mexicans will accept a rate much lower than this not exceeding $2 a day in most places-but they do not do as much work as a white man. Mining men were undecided which got out the ore for the least money. In one mine, where a complete change from Mexican to American miners had been made within twelve months, one of the owners attributed the change to the fact that the new manager was used to working with white men, adding that there was no special economy in changing, and at the same time no appreciable loss. He suggested, however, that a manager working for absentee owners might make a little more out of the Mexicans for himself, especially if he had an interest in the company store. Another mine owner, who was employing Mexicans alone, said that he was influenced by fear of labor difficulties-that his mine was isolated and a white union might tie it up entirely; but that if some of the Mexicans left him or became dissatisfied he could easily replace them.

In the coal mining district around Trinidad, Colo., Mexicans have been employed as strike breakers; but with Mexican labor exclusively the output of the mines was so irregular as to cause serious losses;

therefore, in this field other labor has been substituted almost entirely. The Mexicans make very fair coke pullers, and are employed especially upon extra gangs. They seem to prefer the irregular work and pay they get in these gangs to the monotony of steady employment even at a sure wage.

Within the Mexican labor area of the United States there are four coal-mining districts. The most important is in southern Kansas and Oklahoma, which employs chiefly Italians and Negroes, with no Mexicans except a few surface men employed at an extreme offshoot-possibly not strictly a part of this field-at Thurber, Tex. The field of next importance and of prime importance for coking and ore reduction is in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, the largest mines in the Territory having been opened within a year or two. Here Spanish-speaking labor, from both New Mexico and Mexico, is employed to some extent, though Slavs and Italians do most of the actual mining. In a careful analysis of the nationality of the mine workers employed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1905, Dr. Walter Morritt, of the sociological department of the company, gives the following figures: North Italians, 1,139; South Italians, 489; Austrians, 851; Americans, 687; Mexicans, 650; Slavs, 355; Negroes, 304; English, 297; Hungarians, 245; Japanese, 105; Germans, 79; Poles, 68; Welsh, 68; Scotch, 58; Greeks, 58; Russians, 51; Montenegrins, 29; Swedes, 27; Irish, 26; French, 15; Finlanders, 12; Roumanians, 7; Arabs, 5; Swiss, 1, making a total of 5,626. The proportion of Mexicans-and the term here is applied to Spanish-speaking workers from both sides of the border-was larger than previously because this class of labor had been used as strike breakers during the strike of 1903-4. Doctor Morritt expresses the following unfavorable opinion of these workers: "The Indian and the Mexican are both utterly unadapted to the work of mining. The Mexican can be depended on for a certain amount of surface work, but he can rarely be persuaded to work underground. He is shiftless and lacks ambition, and only in time of strike, when extra inducements are offered in the way of best rooms in the mines, generous weights, donations of liquor on the part of the pit boss, is any underground work to be gotten out of him at all; and even then he is not to be relied upon after he has a few dollars to his credit with which to buy Dago Red,' as the cheap adulterated whisky is called."

But there are exceptions. The superintendent of one of the largest camps of this company said that while he did not employ enough Mexicans underground to affect the output of the mine materially, because they could not be relied upon to turn out the same amount every day, he found places for such as wanted to work. Mexicans averaged seventeen to eighteen days in their rooms, where European