The mountain-slopes which descend from the Sierra Madre eastward toward the sea are furrowed by barrancas—deep ravines with perpendicular sides, and with streams flowing at the bottom. But here all these barrancas run almost due east and west, so that our journey from Vera Cruz to Mexico was made, as far as I can recollect, without crossing one. Now, the case was quite different. We had to go from the Potrero to the city of Jalapa, about fifty miles on the map, nearly northward, and to get over these fifty miles cost us two days and a half of hard riding.
By the road it cannot be much less than eighty miles; but people used to tell us that, during the American war, an Indian went from Orizaba to Jalapa with despatches within the twenty-four hours, probably by mountain-paths which made it a little shorter. He came quite easily into Jalapa at the same shuffling trot which he had kept up almost without intermission for the whole distance. This is the Indian’s regular pace when he is on a journey, and I believe that the Red Indians of the north have a similar gait.
We used sometimes to see a village or a house three or four miles off, and count upon reaching it in half an hour. But a few steps further on there would be a barranca, invisible till we came close to it, perhaps not more than a few hundred feet wide, so that it was easy to talk to people on the other bank. But the bottom of the chasm might be five hundred or a thousand feet below us; and the only way to cross was to ride along the bank, often for miles, until we reached a place where it had been possible to make a steep bridle-path zigzagging down to the stream below, and up again on the other side. It is only here and there that even such paths can be made, for the walls of rock are generally too steep even for any vegetation, except grass and climbing plants in the crevices. Our half-hour’s ride, as we supposed it would be, would often extend to two or three hours, for on these slopes two or three barrancas—large and small—-have sometimes to be crossed within as many miles.
If our journey had been even slower and more difficult, we should not have regretted it; the country through which we were riding was so beautiful. There were but few inhabitants, and the landscape was much as nature had left it. The great volcano of Orizaba came into view now and then with its snowy cone,[24] mountain-streams came rushing along the ravines, and the forests of oaks were covered with innumerable species of orchids and creepers, breaking down the branches with their weight. Many kinds were already in flower, and their great blossoms of white, purple, blue, and yellow, stood out against the dark green of the oak-leaves. Wherever a mountain-stream ran down some shady little valley, there were tree-ferns thirty feet high, with the new fronds forming a tuft at the top of the old scarred trunk. Round the Indian cottages were cactuses with splendid crimson flowers, daturas with brilliant white blossoms, palm- and fruit-trees of fifty kinds. We stopped at one of the cottages, and bought an armadillo that had just been caught in the woods close by, while routing among his favourite ants’ nests. He was put into a palm-leaf basket, which held him all but the tip of his long taper tail, which, like the rest of his body, was covered with rings of armour fitting beautifully into one another. One of our men carried him thus in his arms to Jalapa.
[24] See the illustration at page 281.
The Mexicans call an armadillo “ayotochtli,” that is, “tortoise-rabbit,” a name which will be appreciated by any one who knows the appearance of the little animal.
The villages and towns we passed were dismal places enough, and the population scanty; but that this had not always been the case was evident from the numerous remains of ancient Indian mound-forts or temples which we passed on our road, indicating the existence of large towns at some former period. There is a drawing in Lord Kingsborough’s work of a teocalli or pyramid at San Andrés Chalchicomula, which we seem to have missed on account of the darkness having come on before we reached the town. We were several times deceived that evening by the fireflies, which we took for lights moving about in some village just ahead of us; and we became so incredulous at last that we would not believe we had reached our journey’s end until we could made out the dim outlines of the houses. At the inn at San Andrés we found that we could have no rooms, as all the little windowless dens were occupied by people from the country who had come in for a fiesta. There were indeed a good many men loafing about the courtyard, but scarcely any women, and we could hardly understand a fandango happening without them. They thought otherwise, however; and presently, hearing the tinkling of a guitar, we went out and saw two great fellows in broad hats, jackets, and serapes, solemnly dancing opposite to one another; while more men looked on, smoking cigarettes, and an old fellow with a face like a baboon was squatting in one corner and producing the music we had heard. To do them justice, I must say that we found, on further enquiry, they had not come from their respective ranchos merely to make fools of themselves in this way, but that there was to be some horsefair in the neighbourhood next day, and they were going there.
Our not being able to get any supper but eggs and bread, and having to sleep on the supper-table afterwards, confirmed us in the theory we were beginning to adopt, that nature and mankind vary in an inverse ratio; and we were off at daybreak, delighted to get into the forest again. We rode over hill and dale for four or five hours, and then along the edge of a barranca for the rest of the day. This was one of the grandest chasms we had ever seen, even in Mexico. It was four or five miles wide, and two or three thousand feet deep, and its floor was a mass of tropical verdure, with here and there an Indian rancho and a patch of cultivated ground on the bank of the rapid river, whose sound we heard when we approached the edge of the barranca. There were more orchids and epidendrites than ever in the forest. In some places they had killed every third tree, by forming so and close a covering over its branches as to destroy its life; they were flourishing unimpaired on the rotting branches of trees which they had brought down to the ground years before. The rainy season had not yet set in in this part of the country; and, though we could hear the rushing of the torrent below, we looked in vain for water in the forest, until our man Martin showed us the bromelias in the forks of the branches, in the inside of whose hollow leaves nature has laid up a supply of water for the thirsty traveller.
We loaded our horses with the bulbs of such orchids as were still in the dry state, and would travel safely to Europe. Sometimes we climbed into the trees for promising specimens, but oftener contented ourselves with tearing them from the branches as we rode below. When saddle-bags and pockets were full, we were for a time at fault, for there seemed no place for new treasures, when suddenly I remembered a pair of old trousers. We tied up the ends of the legs, which we filled with orchids; and the garment travelled to Jalapa sitting in its natural position across my saddle, to the amazement of such Mexican society as we met. The contents of the two pendant legs are now producing splendid flowers in several English hothouses.
By evening we reached the Junta, a place where the great ravine was joined by a smaller one, and a long slanting descent brought us to the edge of the river. There was a ferry here, consisting of a raft of logs which the Indian ferryman hauled across along a stout rope. The horses were attached to the raft by their halters, and so swam across. On the point of land between the two rivers the Indians had their huts, and there we spent the night. We chose the fattest guajalote of the turkey-pen, and in ten minutes he was simmering in the great earthen pot over the fire, having been cut into many pieces for convenience of cooking, and the women were busy grinding Indian corn to be patted out into tortillas. While supper was getting ready, and Mr. Christy’s day’s collection of plants was being pressed (the country we had been passing through is so rich that the new specimens gathered that day filled several quires of paper), we had a good deal of talk with the brown people, who could all speak a little Spanish. Some years before, the two old people had settled there, and set up the ferry. Besides this, they made nets and caught much fish in the river, and cultivated the little piece of ground which formed the point of the promontory. While their descendants went no further than grandchildren the colony had done very well; but now great-grandchildren had begun to arrive, and they would soon have to divide, and form a settlement up in the woods across the river, or upon some patch of ground at the bottom of one of the barrancas.
We were interested in studying the home-life of these people, so different from what we are accustomed to among our peasants of Northern Europe, whose hard continuous labour is quite unknown here. For the men, an occasional pull at the balsas (the rafts of the ferry), a little fishing, and now and then—when they are in the humour for it— a little digging in the garden-ground with a wooden spade, or dibbling with a pointed stick. The women have a harder life of it, with the eternal grinding and cooking, cotton-spinning, mat-weaving, and tending of the crowds of babies. Still it is an easy lazy life, without much trouble for to-day or care for to-morrow. When the simple occupations of the day are finished, the time does not seem to hang heavy upon their hands. The men lie about, “thinking of nothing at all;” and the women—old and young—gossip by the hour, in obedience to that beneficent law of nature which provides that their talk shall increase inversely in proportion to what they have to talk about. We find this law attaining to its most complete fulfilment when they shut themselves up in nunneries, to escape as much as possible from all sources of worldly interest, and gossip there more industriously than anywhere else, as we are informed on very good authority.
Like all the other Mexican Indians whose houses we visited, the people here showed but little taste in adorning their dwellings, their dresses and their household implements. Beyond a few calabashes scraped smooth and ornamented with coloured devices, and the blue patterns on the women’s cotton skirts, there was scarcely anything to be seen in the way of ornament. How great was the skill of the Mexicans in ornamental work at the time of the Conquest, we can tell from the carved work in wood and stone preserved in museums, the graceful designs on the pottery, the tapestry, and the beautiful feather-work; but this taste has almost disappeared in the country. Just in the same way, contact with Europeans has almost destroyed the little decorative arts among most barbarous people, as, for example, the Red Indians and the natives of the Pacific Islands; and what little skill in these things is left among them is employed less for themselves than in making curious trifles for the white people, and even in these we find that European patterns have mixed with the old designs, or totally superseded them.
The Indians lodged us in an empty cane-hut, where they spread mats upon the ground, and we made pillows of our saddles. We were soon tired of looking up at the stars through the chinks in the roof, and slept till long after sunrise. Then the Indians rafted us across the second river; and we rode on to Jalapa, having accomplished our horseback journey of nearly three hundred miles with but one accident, the death of a horse, the four-pound one. He had been rather overworked, but would most likely have got through, had we not stopped the last night at the Indian ranchos, where there was no forage but green maize leaves, a food our beasts were not accustomed to. It seems our men gave him too much of this, and then allowed him to drink excessively; and next morning he grew weaker and weaker, and died not long after we reached Jalapa. Our other two horses were rather thin, but otherwise in good condition; and the horse-dealers, after no end of diplomacy on both sides, knocked under to our threat of sending them back to Mexico in charge of Antonio, and gave us within a pound or two of what they had cost us. There, is a good deal of trading in horses done at Jalapa, where travellers coming down from Mexico sell their beasts, which are disposed of at great prices to other travellers coming up from the coast. Between here and Vera Cruz, people prefer travelling in the Diligence, or in some covered carriage, to exposing themselves to the sun in the hot and pestilential region of the coast.
Jalapa is a pleasant city among the hills, in a country of forests, green turf, and running streams. It is the very paradise of botanists; and its products include a wonderful variety of trees and flowers, from the apple- and pear-trees of England to the mameis and zapotes of tropical America, and the brilliant orchids which are the ornament of our hot-houses. The name of the town itself has a botanical celebrity, for in the neighbouring forests grows the Purga de Jalapa, which we have shortened into jalap.
A day’s journey above it, lies the limit of eternal snow, upon the peak of Orizaba; a day’s journey below it is Vera Cruz, the city of the yellow fever, surrounded by burning sands and poisonous exhalations, in a district where, during the hot months now commencing, the thermometer scarcely ever descends below 80°, day or night. Jalapa hardly knows summer or winter, heat or cold. The upper current of hot air from the Gulf of Mexico, highly charged with aqueous vapour, strikes the mountains about this level, and forms the belt of clouds that we have already crossed more than once during our journey. Jalapa is in this cloudy zone, and the sky is seldom clear there. It is hardly hotter in summer than in England, and not even hot enough for the mosquitoes, which are not to be found here though they swarm in the plain below. This warm damp climate changes but little in the course of the year. There are no seasons, in our sense of the word, for spring lasts through the year.
We walked out on the first afternoon of our arrival; and sat on stone seats on a piece of green turf surrounded by trees, that reminded us pleasantly of the village-greens of England. There we talked with the children of an English acquaintance who had been settled for many years in the town, and had married a Mexican lady. They were fine lads; but, as very often happens in such cases, they could only speak the language of the country. Nothing can show more clearly how thoroughly a foreigner yields to the influences around him, when he settles in a country and marries among its people. An Englishman’s own character, for instance, may remain to some extent; but his children are scarcely English in language or in feeling, and in the next generation there is nothing foreign about his descendants but the name.
When we reached our hotel it was about sunset, and the heavy dew had wetted us through, as though we had been walking in the rain. This was no exceptional occurrence. All the year round such dews fall morning and evening, as well as almost daily showers of rain. The climate is too warm for this dampness to injure health, as it would in our colder regions. To us, who had just left the bracing air of the high plateaus, it seemed close and relaxing; but the inhabitants are certainly strong and healthy, and one can imagine the enjoyment which the white inhabitants of Vera Cruz must feel, when they can get away from that city of pestilence into the pure air of the mountains.
Our quarters were at the Veracruzana, where we occupied a great whitewashed room. A large grated window opened into the garden, where the armadillo was fastened to a tree by a long string, and had soon dug a deep hole with his powerful fore-claws, as the manner of the creature is. The necessity of supplying the “little man in armour” with insects for his daily food gave us some idea of the amazing abundance and variety of the insects of the district. We caught creeping things innumerable in the garden, but narrowly escaped being stung by a small scorpion; and therefore delegated the task to an old Indian, who walked out into the fields with an earthen pot, and returned with it full of insects in about half an hour. We reckoned that there were over fifty species in the pot.
Many of the houses and Indian huts were adorned with collections of insects pinned on the walls in patterns, among which figured scorpions some three inches long; and the centre-ornament was usually a tarantula, said to be one of the most poisonous creatures of the tropics, a monstrous spider, whose dark grey body and legs are covered with hairs. A fine specimen will have a body about as large as a small hen’s egg, and, with his legs in their natural position, will just stand in a cheese-plate. The Boots of the hotel went out and caught a fine scorpion for our amusement; he brought it into our room wrapped in a piece of brown paper, and was on the point of letting it out on our table for us to see it run. We protested against this, and had it put into a tumbler and covered it up with a book.
The inner patio of the hotel was surrounded with the usual arcade, into which the rooms opened. Close to our door was a long table, with a green cloth, where the Jalapenians were constantly playing monte, from nine in the morning till late at night. All classes were represented there, from the muleteer who came to lose his hard-earned dollars, to the rich shopkeepers and planters of the town and neighbourhood.
I went early one afternoon to the house of the principal agent for the Vera Cruz carriers, to arrange for sending down our heavy packages to the coast. There was no one at the office but a girl. I enquired for the master—“Está jugando,”—“He is playing,” she said. I need not have gone so far to look for him, for he was sitting just outside our bedroom door, and indeed had been there all day. Before he condescended to arrange our business, he waited to see the fate of the dollar he had just put down, and which I was glad to see he lost.
Jalapa was not always the stagnant place it is now. Its pleasant houses and gardens date from a period when it was a town of some importance. In old times the only practicable road from Vera Cruz to Mexico passed this way; and Jalapa was the entrepôt where the merchants had their warehouses, and from whence the trains of mules distributed the European merchandise from the coast to the different markets of the country. By this arrangement, the carrying from the coast was done by a small number of muleteers, who were seasoned to the climate, while the great mass of traders and carriers were not obliged to descend from the healthy region. This was of the more importance, because, though the pure Indians are not liable to the attacks of yellow fever, the disease is as deadly to the other inhabitants of the high lands as to Europeans; and even those of the mestizos who have the least admixture of white blood are subject to it. Of late years, this system has been given up, and the carriers from the high lands go down to the coast to fetch their loads, and every year they leave some of their number in the church-yards of the City of the Dead; while many others, though they recover from the fever, never regain their former health and strength. The high-road to Mexico now goes by Orizaba, so that the importance of Jalapa as a trading-place has almost ceased.
Our Mexican journey was now all but finished, and I left my companion here, and took the Diligence to Vera Cruz, to meet the West India Mail-packet. Mr. Christy followed a day or two later, and went to the United States. We dismissed our two servants, Martin and Antonio. Martin invested his wages in a package of tobacco, which he proposed to carry home on his horse, travelling by night along unfrequented mountain-paths, where custom-house officers seldom penetrate. We never heard any more of him; but no doubt he got safe home, for he was perfectly competent to take care of himself, and he probably made a very good thing of his journey. It was quite with regret that we parted from him, for he was a most sensible, useful fellow, with a continual flow of high spirits, and no end of stories of his experiences in smuggling, and hunting wild cattle in the tierra caliente, in which two adventurous occupations most of his life had been passed. In his dealings with us, he was honesty itself, notwithstanding his equivocal profession.
We offered Antonio a cheque on Mexico for his wages, as he was going back there, but he said he would rather have hard dollars. We paid his fare to Mexico by the Diligence, and gave him his money, telling him at the same time, that he was a fool for his pains. He started next morning; and we heard, a month or two later, that the coach was stopped the same afternoon in the plains of Perote, and Antonio was robbed not only of his money but even of his jacket and serape, and reached Mexico penniless and half-naked. He was always a silly fellow, and his last exploit was worthy of him.
Mr. Christy sat up till daybreak to see me off, filling up his time by writing letters and pressing plants. When I was gone, he lay down in his bed, in rather a dreamy state of mind, looking up at the ceiling. There was a large beam just above his head, and at one side of it a hole, which struck him as being a suitable place for a scorpion to come out of. This idea had come into his head from the sight of the specimen in the tumbler on the table, who had with great difficulty been drowned in aguardiente. Presently something moved in the hole, and the spectator below instantly became wide awake. Then came out a claw and a head, and finally the body and tail of a very fine scorpion, two inches and a half long. It was rather an awkward moment, for it was not safe to move suddenly, for fear of startling the creature, whose footing seemed anything but secure; and if he fell, he would naturally sting whatever he might come in contact with. However, he met with no accident on his way, and getting into another hole, about a yard off, he drew up his tail after him and disappeared. Mr. Christy slipped out of his bed with a sense of considerable relief; and having ascertained that there were no holes in the ceiling above the bed on the other side of the room, he turned in there, and went comfortably to sleep.
My only companion in the Diligence was a German shopman from Vera Cruz, who was sociable, but not of an instructive turn of conversation. When we had descended for a few hours, the heat became intolerable. Scarcely any habitation but a few Indian cane-huts by the way-side, with bananas and palm-trees. We stopped, about three in the afternoon, at a rancho in a small village, and did not start again until next morning, a little before day-break. Negroes and people of negro descent began to abound in this congenial climate. I remember especially the waiting-maid at the rancho, who was a “white negress,” as they are called. Her hair and features showed her African origin; but her hair was like white wool, and her face and hands were as colourless as those of a dead body. This animated corpse was healthy enough, however; and this peculiarity of the skin is, it seems, not very uncommon.
The coast-regions through which I was passing abound in horned cattle, but they are mostly far away from the high-roads. In spite of the intense heat of the climate they thrive as well as in the higher lands. Some are tolerably tame, and are kept within bounds by the vaqueros; but the greater proportion, numbering tens of thousands, roam wild about the country. In comparison with these cattle of the tierra caliente, the fiercest beasts of the plateaus are safe and quiet creatures. The only way of bringing them into the corral is by using tame animals for decoys, just as wild elephants are caught.
Our man Martin, who had once been a vaquero on the Vera Cruz coast, used to look upon the bulls of the high lands with great contempt. If you chase them they run away, he said. If you lazo a bull of the hot country, you have to gallop off with all your might, with the toro close at your heels; and, if the horse falls, it may cost his life or his rider’s.
We thus find the horned cattle flourishing at every elevation, from the sea-level to the mountain-pastures ten thousand feet above it. Horses and sheep show less adaptability to this variety of climates. The horses and mules come mostly from the States of the North, at a level of from 5,000 to 8,000 feet; that remarkable country of which Humboldt’s observation gives us the best idea, when he says that, although there are no made roads, wheel-carriages can travel distances of a thousand miles over gently-undulating prairies, without meeting any obstruction on the way.
Numbers of sheep are reared in the mountains, principally for the sake of the tallow, for the consumption of tallow-candles in the mines is enormous. The owners scarcely care at all for the rest of the animal; and popular scandal accuses the sheep-farmers of driving their flocks straight into the melting-coppers, without going through the preliminary ceremony of killing them. People told us that the tallow made in the cold regions loses its consistency when brought down into hotter climates, but we had no means of ascertaining the truth of this.
Artificial lighting by means of tallow was not known to the ancient Mexicans, who could not indeed have procured tallow except from the fat of deer and smaller animals.
Bernal Diaz tells how the Spanish invaders used to dress their wounds with “Indian Ointment.” He explains the nature of this preparation in another place. The Spaniards could get no oil in the country, nor anything else to make salve with, so they took some fat Indian who had just been killed in battle, and simply boiled him down.
Our ride next morning was but a few hours, the journey being so divided in order that the passengers may reach Vera Cruz before the heat of the day begins. We passed over a dreary district, generally too dry for anything but cactus and acacias, but now and then, when a little water was to be found, displaying clumps of bamboos with their elegant feathery tufts. Then the railway took us through the dismal downs, with their swamps and sand-hills, and so into Vera Cruz.
The English merchants we had already made acquaintance with were as kind and hospitable as ever, and I found an Englishman, whom we had known before, going as far as Havana by the same packet. The yellow fever was unusually late this year, and, though June had begun, there were but few cases. We heard afterwards that it set in a week or two after our departure, and by its extraordinary severity made ample amends for the lateness of its arrival.
After sunset, the air was alive with mosquitos, and the floors of the hotel swarmed with cockroaches. The armadillo took quite naturally to the latter creatures, and crunched them up as fast as we could catch them for him. I was surprised to find that our word “cockroaches” does not come from the German stock, like most of our names for insects and small creatures, but from the Latin side of the house. The Spanish waiter called them cucarachas, and the French ones coqueraches. The history of the armadillo ends unfortunately: for some days he seemed to take quite kindly to the diet of bits of meat which we had to put him on, on shipboard, but he fell sick at Havana, and died.
My late companion travelled up into the Northern States, went to the Indian assembly at Manitoulin Island, paid a visit to various tribes of Red Men in the Hudson’s Bay Territory—as yet unmissionized, carried away in triumph the big medicine-drum I have already spoken of, and saw and did many other things not to be related here. One sight that he saw, some months later, reminded him of the wild country where we had travelled together. He was in Iowa City, a little town of a year or two’s growth, out in the prairie States of the Far West. As he stood one morning in the outskirts, among the plank-houses and half-made roads, there came a solitary horseman riding in. Evidently he had come from the Mexican frontier, a thousand miles and more away across the plains; and no doubt, his waggons and the rest of his party were behind him on the road, beyond the distant horizon of the prairie. By his face he was American, but his costume was the dress of old Mexico, the leather jacket and trousers, the broad white hat and huge jingling spurs. His lazo hung in front of his high-peaked saddle, and his well-worn serape was rolled up behind him like a trooper’s cloak. As he approached the town, he spurred his jaded beast, who broke into the old familiar paso of the Mexican plains. “It was my last sight of Mexico,” said my companion. He saluted the horseman in Spanish, and the well-known words of welcome made the grim man’s haggard sunburnt features relax into a smile as he returned the salutation and rode on.
As for myself, my voyage home was short and unadventurous. From Vera Cruz to Havana, most of my companions were Mexican refugees who had been turned out of the country for being mixed up with Haro’s revolution or Santa Ana’s intrigues. They were showily got-up men, elaborately polite, and with much to say for themselves; but every now and then some casual remark showed what stuff they were made of, and I pitied more than ever the unfortunate countries whose political destinies depend on the intrigues of these adventurers.
In the hot land-locked bay of St. Thomas’s we, with the contents of eight or nine more steamers, were shifted into the great steamer bound homeward. I went ashore with an old German gentleman, and walked about the streets. St. Thomas’s is a Danish island, and a free port, that is, a smuggling depôt for the rest of the West India islands, much as Gibraltar is for the Mediterranean. It is a stifling place, full of mosquitos and yellow fever, and the confusion of tongues reigns there even more than in Gibraltar, for the blacks in the streets all speak three or four languages, and the shopkeepers six or seven.
We were a strange mixture on board the ‘Atrato’, over two hundred of us. Peruvians and Chilians from across the isthmus, Spaniards and Cubans, black gentlemen from Hayti, French colonists from Martinique, but English preponderating above all other nationalities. One or two governors of small islands, with their families, maintaining the dignity of Government House, at least as far as Southampton, and unapproachable by common mortals. Army men from West India stations, who appeared to spend their mornings in ordering the wine for dinner, and their evenings in abusing it when they had drunk it. West India planters, who thought it was rather hard that the Anti-slavery Society, after ruining them and their plantations, should moreover insist on their believing themselves to be great gainers by the change. We were all crowded, hot, and uncomfortable, and showed our worst side, but as we neared England better influences got the ascendant again.
It was pleasant to breathe a cooler air, and to feel that I was getting back to my own country and my own people; but with this feeling there was mixed some regret for the beautiful scenes I had left. The evenings of our latitudes seemed poor when we lost the gorgeous sunsets of the tropics, and the sea alive with luminous creatures. When I came on deck one evening and missed the brightest ornament of the sky—the Southern Cross, I felt that I had left the tropics, and that all my efforts to realize the life of the last half-year would produce but a vague and shadowy picture.
Since we left Mexico, I have not cared to follow very accurately even the newspaper intelligence of what has been and still is going on there. It is a pitiable history. Continual wars and revolutions, utter insecurity of life and property, the Indians burning down the haciendas in the South and turning out the white people, the roads on the plains impassable on account of deserters and robbers; sometimes no practical government at all, then two or three at once, who raise armies and fight a little sometimes, but generally confine themselves to plundering the peaceable inhabitants. An army besieges the capital for months, but appears to do nothing but cut the water off from the aqueducts, shoot stragglers, and levy contributions. One leader raises a forced loan among the foreign residents, and imprisons or expels those who do not submit. The leader on the other side does the same in his part of the country, putting the British merchant in prisons where a fortnight would be a fair average life for an European, and threatening him with summary courtmartial and execution if he does not pay.
London newspapers dwell on these details, and tell us that we may learn from the condition of this unfortunate country how useless are democratic forms among a people incapable of liberty, and that very weak governments can commit all sorts of crimes with impunity, from the fact that they have no official existence which foreign powers can recognize; and various other weighty moral lessons, which must be highly edifying to our countrymen in the Republic, who are meanwhile left pretty much to shift for themselves.
All this time the United States are steadily advancing; and the destiny of the country is gradually accomplishing itself. That its total absorption must come, sooner or later, we can hardly doubt. The chief difficulty seems to be that the American constitution will not exactly suit the case. The Republic laid down the right of each citizen to his share in the government of the country as a universal law, founded on indefeasible lights of humanity, fundamental laws of nature, and what not, making, it is true, some slight exceptions with regard to red and black men. The Mexicans, or at least the white and half-caste Mexicans, will be a difficulty. Their claims to citizenship are unquestionable, if Mexico were made a State of the Union; and, as everybody knows, they are totally incapable of governing themselves, which they must be left to do under the constitutional system of the United States; moreover, it is certain that American citizens would never allow even the whitest of the Mexicans to be placed on a footing of equality with themselves. Supposing these difficulties got over by a Protectorate, an armed occupation, or some similar contrivance, Mexico will undergo a great change. There will be roads and even rail-roads, some security for life and property, liberty of opinion, a nourishing commerce, a rapidly increasing population, and a variety of good things. Every intelligent Mexican must wish for an event so greatly to the advantage of his country and of the world in general.
Some of our good friends in Mexico have bought land on the American frontier by the hundred square leagues, and can point out patches upon the map of the world as large as Scotland or Ireland—as their private property. What their gains will be when enterprising western men begin to bring the country under cultivation, it is not an easy matter to realize.
As for ourselves individually, we may be excused for cherishing a lurking kindness for the quaint, picturesque manners and customs of Mexico, as yet un-Americanized; and for rejoicing that it was our fortune to travel there before the coming change, when its most curious peculiarities and its very language must yield before foreign influences.