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HOEVER in the United States eats bread is indebted to Yucatan.

The bread supply of the United States is dependent on Yucatan.

Yet Yucatan imports flour from the United States.

These statements seem irreconcilable, but they are not. Although Yucatan produces insufficient flour for herself, a product of Yucatan makes it possible for us to have bread. That product is henequen. Of all the bread-eating Americans, probably only a few have ever heard of henequen. Yet without henequen we could hardly harvest our grain crops, and consequently without henequen we could hardly get bread.

From henequen is made the twine with which most of the grain crops of the United States are bound into sheaves. Eighty per cent of the world's henequen and the best henequen in the world is grown in Yucatan. And more than ninety per cent of the total henequen crop of Yucatan is used every year to make binder twine for the farmers of the United States. Consequently, any shortage of henequen may mean a shortage of grain and ultimately of bread, and any increase in the price of henequen to the American farmers may mean an increase in the price of bread to the American public.

In 1916 the farmers of this country were forced to pay $4,000,000 more for their binder twine than in 1915. There is a great probability that they will have to meet a further increase of several million dollars in 1917. All this affects you, the average bread-eater of this country, who have already felt the enormous increase in the cost of living that has taken place in the past year.

Yucatan imports flour, not because she has to, but because she chooses to. Her soil, while not rich, is adequate to raise enough grain to feed all the three hundred thousand Yucatecans. But this grain would be of only mediocre quality, for the soil of the country is full of lime, which is not calculated to aid the growth of most vegetation. Yet this very calcareous quality of the soil, which discourages ordinary crops, encourages the growth of henequen. In fact, the extraor dinarily limy nature of Yucatan earth is the

reason why henequen grows there better than in any other part of the globe.

The owner of a large tract of rich orebearing land would be a fool if he devoted that land to agriculture. So the Yucatecans would be fools if they devoted their barrenlooking but valuable soil to ordinary agriculture. Instead they grow henequen and sell it to buy their grain, eggs, milk, limousines, and trips to Paris and New York. Well do they call it "the green gold of Yucatan."

If you go to Yucatan by water, almost the first thing you see is henequen. The land back of the yellow ribbon of beach is green with the aquamarine of henequen fields. From this green henequen are made the flaxen threads of sisal hemp, and from the sisal hemp is manufactured the American farmers' binder twine.

The green gold is welded into the history of Yucatan and into the life of the people to-day. The wonderful ruined cities of the ancient Maya Indian civilization which are scattered through the jungle of interior Yucatan were built with the aid of henequen. With ropes made of sisal fiber the laborers of ancient dynasties hauled to the tops of their pyramidal temples the great stone blocks which time has not tumbled. To-day the uses of henequen are multifarious. After meals the modern natives of this cleanest Mexican State saw their teeth with strands of sisal fiber in lieu of dental floss. At night they sleep in hammocks of the same thread, for in Yucatan the only beds are in the hotels for tourists. Sacks for carrying vegetables or other merchandise are made of sisal. Door-mats are made of it, ladies' slippers, the harness of burros, and the springs of the native volan, a cart on two giant wheels which alone of all vehicles can travel the rocky roads of the interior.

Sisal hemp forms the warp and woof of Yucatecan social, business, and official life. Henequen is the foundation of society in Yucatan. In a former article I told how Governor Salvador Alvarado has derived from henequen the capital to begin the building of his idea of a Utopia-a sort of Socialistic des

potism-which his enemies call a "Socialistic hell." I described how the Governor has abolished peonage, established an eight-hour day for labor, closed most of the churches, opened many schools, abolished bull-fights and gambling, and established temperancemost of these things done with the funds derived from the Government control of the sisal monopoly.

This monopoly of henequen is already of vital importance to American farmers who raise grain, and is likely to be of vital importance to all Americans through the effect it may have on the price of cereals and the price of bread, the commonest of all foods after mothers' milk. The question of the right and wrong, legality or illegality, of this monopoly is before the American public now. Indeed, almost a year ago a sub-committee of the United States Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry began an investigation of this monopoly, for through its sale of henequen to American twine manufacturers the monopoly becomes subject to American laws. This sub-committee, after hearing a vast amount of evidence, without publishing a final report, has placed the subject in the hands of the Federal Trade Commission.

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Any one who undertakes a private investigation of this question on his own account without going to Yucatan soon runs into the blunt wall of the flatly contradicted statements of the opponents and defenders of the monopoly. Certain facts, however, can be established even in the United States. the first place, it is unquestioned that the control of the henequen output of Yucatan by the Comision Reguladora del Mercado de Henequen (Commission for Regulating the Henequen Market) as directed by Governor Alvarado is a monopoly. The officers of the Reguladora, as the commission of planters which is Alvarado's stalking-horse is commonly called, admit this, but they deny that it is a monopoly in restraint of trade as defined by the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. But while, on the one hand, it is said that the increase in price felt since the Government formed its monopoly is arbitrary and unjustified; on the other hand, it is alleged that the increase has been justified by a number of circumstances, including increased freight rates between Yucatan and the United States, the increased cost of living in Yucatan, and the increased cost of Manila hemp and New Zealand hemp, the principal competitors of the sisal article.

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On the one hand, it is said that the henequen monopoly has benefited the Yucatecan planters, their laborers, and the whole society of the State. On the other hand, it is said that the monopoly is a hold-up scheme by the Governor, Salvador Alvarado, and that it cheats the planters, injures the cause of labor, and reduces the prosperity of all Yucatan. Of course the question of the legality of the monopoly under the Sherman Law is one for the courts to decide, but it was to get first-hand evidence on such questions as these others just mentioned that I went to YucaFrom the point of view of the American farmer the disadvantage of the increased price of twine, for which some people blame the monopoly, is plain. But if the monopoly is justly administered and is bringing about a greater prosperity in Yucatan, even if it is entirely responsible for the increased price of sisal, there is much to be said for it, for, obviously, it is a primary assumption that, since henequen is a product of Yucatan, the natural advantages derived from the cultivation of it ought first to be felt by the Yucatecans. On the other hand, again, if the extra four million dollars of the American grain-raisers are being badly used by an evil Government to the disadvantage of the mass of Yucatecans, nothing would seem to remain to be said in defense of the monopoly.

Mexico is one of the richest countries in the world, and Yucatan is one of the richest States in Mexico. Although Yucatan produces fish, tortoise-shell, valuable hardwoods, and chicle for the world's chewing-gum, still most of the wealth of the State is derived from henequen. This plant is allied to the maguey plant, called the century plant in the United States, from which is made pulque, the national drink of Mexico. The botanical name for henequen is Agave sisalense, and it is often called sisal grass, sisal hemp, and sisal. Above a thick, cylindrical stump covered with large scales rise the swordlike leaves of the henequen, pointing outward from the grouped bases at the center like chevaux de frise. The Indians found it growing wild in the forests of Yucatan and understood its uses, but for many years it has been carefully cultivated. In the deep coastal strip from the northwest to the southeast of Yucatan, where most of the henequen is grown, an investment in this plant is almost as safe as an investment in good bonds. For, like good bonds, the principal care

henequen requires is to be cut. The plant never grows so well as when the annual increment of new leaves is clipped like dividend coupons.

The henequen of Yucatan is grown on nearly four hundred plantations or haciendas, ranging in size of cultivated area from a few hundred acres to seven thousand, and employing from a score of men and women to several hundred. About two hundred of these haciendas are large ones, and they are owned by about seventy-five old Yucatecan families. These seventy-five families and their con nections, who derive their great wealth from the dividends on the green gold which are cut for them by the great mass of the working classes of Yucatan, have intermarried and have invested their money in other resources of the State until they form a virtual oligarchy, subject nominally to the despotic governors whom Yucatan has had, but in reality usually appointing these governors and within limits controlling Yucatan as firmly as any oligarchy ever controlled any state in history. Thanks to the geographical isolation of Yucatan from the rest of Mexico and thanks to its independent wealth, this oligarchy virtually ruled the State as an independent nation up to some time after the downfall of Huerta. The members of this aristocracy of wealth were wont to leave their plantations in charge of superintendents to supervise the coupon-cutting from the investment in the green gold while the owners devoted most of their time to the limousine life in Paris, London, and New York. Occasionally they would return for a few months to their handsome homes along the Paseo de Montejo, that beautiful boulevard in Yucatan's beautiful capital, Merida, a city of seventy-five families of the "best people " —that is, the large landowners-and of seventy-five thousand other citizens.

Below this class is a small middle class, but seventy per cent or more of the people of Yucatan belong to the lowest class, the class of labor, and are entirely or largely Indian in blood. On the henequen ranches of the State are employed about twenty thousand laborers. These men live with their wives and children on the haciendas, which are virtually the subdivisions of the State, just as counties are the subdivisions of our States. Often the women and children help harvest the sisal. In the old days of the Diaz régime there was a profitable trade in rounding up Indians in northern Mexico and shipping them

by train-load and boat-load to the slavery of the henequen ranches of Yucatan.

The aristocrats who owned these haciendas were not always directly to blame for this slavery. Often the system was adopted by their overseers, more or less without their knowledge. Still the haciendados were responsible, in the ultimate analysis, just as the stockholders in an American railway are ultimately responsible for the policy of the rail

way.

These planters thought that it paid them. best to sell their product in the raw state to American manufacturers rather than to make it into twine in Yucatan. The greatest single buyer of the sisal hemp for years has been the International Harvester Company. Two years ago this corporation and the Plymouth Cordage Company were buying about eighty per cent of the million bales constituting about the recent average annual output of the "green gold mines" of Yucatan. A bale is from 380 to 400 pounds in weight.

Believing that the individual planter was at a disadvantage in selling his product to buyers who were well organized, four years ago several of the henequeneros (henequen planters) decided to band together for co-operative selling. The organization which they formed, with the help of the State Legislature, was called the Comision Reguladora del Mercado de Henequen, and in theory its members were about all the planters in Yucatan. Also in theory the Reguladora acted as the representative of all the planters in determining the selling price of the hemp with the American buyers. But in practice it never worked out so. The agents and brokers of the International Harvester Company and of the Plymouth Cordage Company and the other buyers could always find enough planters willing to sell at the figure of the American corporations to frustrate the attempts of the Reguladora to fulfill the function which its name implies, for the planters had insufficient capital to enable them to withhold selling the henequen long enough to force the foreign buyers to come up to the Reguladora's asking price.

Such was the condition of affairs when Salvador Alvarado came to Yucatan early in 1915. Alvarado, with several thousand soldiers, was sent by Carranza to oust Governor Arguemedo, who had installed himself in the executive office by a shrewd coup d'état. As a reward for the successful accomplishment of his mission Alvarado was himself

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made Governor by Carranza. Now Alvarado is an unusual Mexican, as most men who know him admit, whether they agree with him or not. He is a natural social radical, heart, soul, and bones. Finding himself more or less isolated from the man who had appointed him, and in control of the only soldiers in Yucatan, he proceeded to put into effect many reforms which had been advocated by Carranza and some others, which were part of Alvarado's own private conception of the social millennium. But in order to do these things money was necessary, and in Yucatan money is henequen. The obvious thing to do was to put himself in control of the henequen crop, and Alvarado did it.

As a machine to accomplish his ends he found the Comision Reguladora del Mercado de Henequen ready to hand. The Reguladora had not been regulating, but when Alvarado took hold of it it began to regulate very quickly. The machinery had been failing because the planters had not been putting their combined power behind it. Alvarado forced them to get behind it, and he borrowed $10,000,000 from American bankers as working capital, whereupon the Reguladora became as powerful and all-inclusive a piece of trade-controlling machinery as the world perhaps has ever seen.

Every planter was forced to contract to sell his henequen to the Reguladora for five years by the simple expedient of forcibly preventing the shipment of all sisal from Yucatan which had not passed through the Commission. The planters were forced to lend money to the State Government-which was Alvarado-and were given bonds in the Reguladora in return.

Since Governor Alvarado established the Government sisal monopoly the price of hemp to the American manufacturer has risen greatly. In late November, 1915, when the monopoly was established securely, it was 65% cents a pound. By the end of 1915 it had reached 73% cents, and now it is 103% cents. These figures are for New York. The figures for other American ports vary slightly. But do not fall into the error of believing that the Yucatecan planter got this price for his green gold. By no means. When the price was 65% cents in the United States, the planter in Yucatan was getting 45% cents, and about half of the residue was taken up by freight charges. Later the planter was given 5 cents as his share; and still later the price in New York rose to

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103% cents, of which the planter now receives 7 cents. That still leaves 33% cents between the selling price in this country and the planter's share. Of this 33% cents 14 cents goes out for freight between Progreso and New York. There remain to be deducted charges for marine insurance, warehouse insurance, and dock labor as well as a commission for the bankers who financed the Reguladora. It is difficult to estimate the exact total of these items, but there is left a small sum, perhaps more than a cent, perhaps less, on each pound of sisal still unaccounted for. This profit goes to the State of YucaThe enemies of Governor Alvarado say that this is his personal "rake-off." The Governor says that, in accordance with the rules of the Reguladora, this profit will be divided among the members of the Reguladora, which includes all the planters and himself. He said that this division would take place at the end of the first year of the Reguladora's operations. This year expired about the end of November. It remains to be seen on December 6, as this article goes to press, whether Alvarado will keep his promise to divide. Most of the planters have treated this promise as a joke.

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Inasmuch as the Governor has raised the price of henequen received by the planter from 45% cents a pound to 7 cents, it may not at first be apparent why the Governor is very unpopular with the planters. One reason is that, while he has increased the amount which the planter gets, he has also greatly increased the taxes which the planter must pay to the State; and another reason is that he has extracted forced loans from many of the planters, and otherwise dealt with them in an arbitrary manner. arbitrary manner. In short, what he has given to the planters with one hand he has taken away with the other. At the same time he has established a minimum wage which they must pay their laborers, has established an eight-hour day for all labor, and has forced each planter to establish on his hacienda a school large enough to provide for the education of all the children of that planter's employees.

in a motor car which travels on the railway track. This vehicle is very much like an ordinary automobile except that it is equipped with railway wheels. You leave this at the station and take a sort of small street car which is pulled on a track narrower than a street railway by a small and obstinate but apparently tireless mule. In this car, which holds a dozen people, the mule hauls you half a mile or three or four miles, as the case may be, to the hacienda buildings. This ranch railway is equipped with switches and is constantly crossing similar lines, penetrating in all directions into the vast plain of gray-green henequen which is all about you.

The henequen is usually grown from cuttings or sprouts called hijos (children). In the sixth year a few leaves are cut, just to help the plant grow. The first real cut of leaves is in the seventh year, and thereafter the plant is cut annually for from thirteen to eighteen years. By the time it is from twenty to twenty-five years old the plant has developed a hard, woody bar or pole which projects upwards from the center. The advent of this pole, called a varejón, means the end of the useful life of the plant. On a well-kept plantation each plant is cut twice a year, a 66 ring" of leaves being cut each time. In all, from twenty to thirty leaves are taken from each plant annually, and every thousand leaves will yield seventy or eighty pounds of hemp.

A few years ago the henequen laborer rarely was paid more than fifty centavos (twenty-five cents gold) for each thousand leaves. But Governor Alvarado has fixed sixty centavos for each thousand leaves as the minimum wage of the State, and many ranches pay per thousand as much as a peso, or almost fifty cents gold, for the peso is practically at par in Yucatan, although greatly depreciated everywhere else in Mexico. As a good laborer can cut three thousand leaves a day, he can earn from ninety cents to a dollar and a half gold a day.

Each plantation in Yucatan has its own mill for stripping the hemp from the henequen. This is done by a machine which rips the pulp in each leaf away from the fibers which run the whole length of the leaf and which are the valuable part. The fibers are then dried, bleached, and pressed into bales, when they are shipped off to Merida or Progreso. Here the officials of the Reguladora weigh the bales, credit the planter with his seven cents a pound, and take

charge of selling the finished hemp to American buyers.

The plantation mills which strip the hemp from the leaves are a revelation to an American. With some exceptions, in the United States it still seems to be an accepted tradition that a factory should appear ugly, dirty, and forlorn. The hacienda mills of Yucatan prove that there is no necessity for this, for they are clean and beautifully built structures of a kind of plaster or cement, covered with vines and surrounded with trees. Near by, across a well-trimmed lawn, is usually the spacious home of the henequenero, where, after your inspection of the ranch is completed, you slake your thirst with a drink from a cocoanut just torn from the tree by an agile native. Then you sit down to a never-to-be-forgotten meal consisting of the excellent fish of the Yucatan coast, aguacate salad, tortillas, and beans served as a kind of mush, which is indescribably better than anything that is ever done with beans in our country.

The mere fact that some American jobbers and middlemen have been eliminated from the henequen trade by the formation of the monopoly and that American manufacturers have been forced to pay a higher price for sisal is not a sufficient argument for the condemnation of the Reguladora. Nor is it a sufficient argument that the farmers of the United States had to pay $4,000,000 more for their twine in 1916 than in 1915, and may have to pay a further increase of several millions in 1917. We must look deeper than this.

After all, henequen is a product of Yucatan, and the first thing to be considered in judging the merits of the sisal controversy is the welfare of the State of Yucatan.

For the average Yucatecan Governor Alvarado's tight control of the henequen trade is a good thing. This is so because for the average Yucatecan Alvarado's administration is a good one, and the henequen monopoly is the very foundation of Alvarado's administration.

The establishment of the Alvarado régime has simply meant the substitution of a strong despotism for a nominal despotism controlled by the strings of an oligarchy. Before Alvarado came to Yucatan the real power in the State was the commercial and social oligarchy of the seventy-five richest families of henequen planters, that is, the "best people" of whom Americans hear much from aggrieved mem