content to be so too. Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not let him starve. They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico, is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.
There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these peons to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does not give us a right to judge of its working. We can but compare the opinions of writers who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery. Sartorius, however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must take the only security they can get. He says, and