Ah! dear gentle brown-skinned folk, your night has indeed come; but it is scarcely good. Your heritage is another's. You are his—bodies and souls! Your strength and muscle are given you to enrich him: your backs are his to wheal: your sons and daughters are his: all that you have is his to give or to take away. Truly has the night come! "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." You are meek, but you are disinherited. Verily! there is nothing sacred to man; not even the Beatitudes.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] We saw the Indian women go down on one knee and kiss the hand of the haciendado whose farm we were viewing.
[CHAPTER XX]
YUCATAN AS IT IS TO-DAY AND THE YUCATECANS
The Yucatecans are a race of parvenus. They have been unfortunate both by inheritance and fate. The Spanish have never been successful colonisers. History teaches that they have always suffered from "wind in the head," both socially and religiously. They are bigots, and they are naturally bullies. To these racial failings Fate has added for the Yucatecans the last and most fatal of gifts, sudden wealth. There is no doubt about the wealth of the Yucatecans. Many of them are rich beyond the dreams of even their avarice, and that is saying much. But when to mushroom millionaires is given the governance of an enslaved race, it would be nothing short of a miracle if the very finest and largest breed of parvenus was not produced. If you think of all the bad qualities, the pettinesses and meannesses of all the parvenus you have ever met or heard of, you will have some sort of mental picture of a Yucatecan. If there are any unpleasant characteristics of the parvenu you have forgotten, the typical Yucatecan has got those too.
Avarice is their besetting sin. Money is their god. There is a saying that "Jews cannot live in Yucatan." The sharpest Hebrew would come off second-best in a business deal with a Yucatecan. This is the characteristic of all ages and all ranks. The Yucatecan is always "on the make." It matters not if he is a multi-millionaire. The richest man in the city of Merida would not be in the least offended if you offered to buy the flowers from his patio or garden. He himself would cut what you wanted and drive a hard bargain with you. In a rich quarter of the capital a wealthy family make a practice every dry season of selling water at ten centavos a pail! A foreign resident, accustomed to buy eggs from the servants of one of the great land-owning families of Merida, called one day and found the housekeeper out. The little daughter of the house, ten years old, and entitled, on coming of age, to a million dollars in her own right, overheard the caller speaking to one of the maids, and came out to offer for six centavos one egg which her pet hen had laid. Three centavos is the price of an egg all the year through in Yucatan!
There are no poor Yucatecans. Small wonder: for not only do they lose no opportunity of raking in the shekels, but they openly boast that they never entertain or show hospitality, unless it pays them to do so. We can bear eloquent witness to this, for from end to end of our tour never once was so much as a cup of coffee offered us by a Yucatecan, with the single exception of the semi-official breakfast we earlier described. At the town of Tizimin, where we spent Christmas, though the Jefe and all the authorities of the town knew we were inhabiting a hovel destitute of everything except pegs in the walls on which to swing our hammocks, not a soul in that town of several hundreds of well-to-do people was found to come forward with the offer of a chair or a table, a basin to wash in, or the loan of a little kitchen crockery. No, if we needed such things we must buy them; and if we did not wish to do that, why then we must go without. We had gone to Yucatan intent on roughing it, and we did not mind dining with one of our baggage boxes for table, squatting Turk-fashion on the stone floor. We only mention it as typical of Yucatecan inhospitality, which really passes all understanding.
But rich as the richest Yucatecans are, it is curious to see how little they know how to spend their money. A dozen shoddy rocking-chairs, a roll-top desk, a few Oriental rugs or mats, some painfully modern china, and the walls adorned (!) with a half-dozen hideous oleographs: there you have the typical room of the typical rich Yucatecan. They feel this lack of intelligence in using their enormous wealth, and it leads them into all kinds of bizarre extravagances. They can spend money when they like and when it adds, or they think it adds, to their comfort. One henequen lord went a few years ago to the St. Louis Exhibition. He hired a special steamship, and, on reaching New Orleans, ordered a special train, making the condition that it was to travel never quicker than fifteen miles an hour, and must stop at sunset, no matter how inconvenient this proved to the railway officials. This precious train cost him six hundred pounds; and his whole trip of thirty days cost sixty thousand dollars, or six thousand pounds.