; X1' r>v- xi.~ v. Deposited by the Linonian and Brothers Library I <}j-6 The Awakening of a Nation MEXICO of To-day By Charles F. Lummis Profusely Illustrated NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1898 Copyright, 1898, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. TO THE MASTER OF SPANISH-AMERICANA (and for one inadequate disciple, not master only; but elder brother) ad. f. bandelier It was in my heart {whether in my head or 7tot) to have made this a de finitive picture of Mexico to-day ; for beyond what sentiment may care for mere truth as a means of grace, a cer tain Americanism in me gropes towards the day when we shall no longer sniff ignorantly at all outside our boundaries. But as even more exigent duties al ready stretch my work-hours to twenty in every twenty -four of the year, the pleasure must be foregone of putting what little I know to paper. These pages, then, largely as they were written for Harper's Magazine, are submitted not as a description of Mexico, but as a finger-board along the path to compre hension. If hurried, they are not hasty ; if generic, they do not lack the ancestry of detail; if friendly, it is not by igno rance ; and if they may help another American to more neighborly feeling for a nation we have every reason not to despise and not to dislike, my recompense will be ample for all the work I would like to have done. C. F. L. CONTENTS PAGH I. The Awakening of a Nation i II. Astir in the North 14 III. Among the Old Bonanzas ... 22 IV. Surface Gold 42 V. The Heart of the Nation 49 VI. New Wine in Old Bottles 59 I VII. Cheap Money 71 VIII. An Unfamiliar Page 87 IX. Clubs Not Trumps gS 4 X. The Man 103 . XI. The Ladder 118 XII. Some Outer Activities . 136 XIII. Glimpses of the West Coast 150 XIV. Borrowed from the Enemy . 160 XV. The Spanish- American Face 174 ILLUSTRATIONS [From Ptwtografks by Hie A uihor\ PORFIRIO DIAZ Frontispiece ILLUSTRATED HALF-TITLE xiii GOVERNOR MIGUEL AHUMADA, CHIHUAHUA Facing p. 14 ANNEX-SCHOOL FOR BOYS, CHIHUAHUA " l6 DON LUIS TERRAZAS " l8 HIDALGO'S LAST PRISON " 20 CORNER OF THE PLAZA DE ARMAS, LEON " 22 AROUND THE PILA VALLAREAL, ZACATECAS " 24 ZACATECAS — THE BUFA AND THE AQUEDUCT VILLAREAL " 26 A BIT OF GUANAJUATO " 28 THE MOLINO — ORE-CRUSHER " 32 THE PATIO PROCESS, GUANAJUATO " 34 COURT- YARD OF THE POST-OFFICE, QUERETARO, ONCE THE CONVENT OF SAN AGUSTIN " 36 ENTRANCE TO THE HERCULES MILLS " 38 HUITZILOPOCHTLI " 50 THE FIRST PRINTING-OFFICE IN THE NEW WORLD (1536) " 52 PRESIDENT DIAZ AND HIS PARTY INSPECTING THE DESAGUE MOUTH OF THE TUNNEL OF ZUMPANGO " 54 THE BEST-AUTHENTICATED PORTRAIT OF CORTEZ ... " 56 IN THE HOSPITAL DE JESUS, FOUNDED BY CORTEZ IN 1527 " 58 THE GREAT CARACOL STAIRCASE, CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO ' ' 62 X ILLUSTRATIONS A PATIO IN THE PRISON OF BELEM Facing p. 64 THE BARRACKS OF LA MERCED " 66 NATIONAL CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC " 68 THE NATIONAL LIBRARY, ONCE THE CONVENT OF SAN AGUSTIN " 70 DOOR OF THE CASA DEL CONDE, MEXICO " 72 THE NATIONAL PALACE " 74 THE SALTO DE AGUA, MEXICO (l77g) " 76 THE HALL OF AMBASSADORS " 78 GUILLERMO PRIETO AND HIS DAUGHTER " 90 LAST PAGE AND COLOPHON OF THE THIRD BOOK PRINTED IN THE NEW WORLD (£540) gl THE FIRST WOOD - ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN THE NEW WORLD Facingf. g2 THE FIRST MUSIC PRINTED IN AMERICA (1584) 93 THE LITTLE CHARRO Faci?tgp. 94 GENERAL VIEW OF CHIHUAHUA " 98 GENERAL DIAZ IN l866 " 108 SENORA DIAZ, CALLED " CARMELITA, THE IDOL OF MEXICO" " 114 THE CASTLE OF CHAPULTEPEC — MAIN TERRACE ... " IlS PORFIRIO DIAZ, JUN C " 120 A GLIMPSE OF CHAPULTEPEC " 122 THE BATTLE-FIELD OF PUEBLA, WITH POPOCA-TEPETL AND YZTACCfHUATL IN THE DISTANCE " 124 THE MILITARY COLLEGE, CHAPULTEPEC " 126 CHURCH OF LA SOLEDAD, OAXACA " I28 DIVISIONS OF THE MEXICAN ARMY " j^q A VIEW FROM CHAPULTEPEC " I32 MEXICAN CAVALRY " j,. LA NORIA, PRESIDENT DIAZ'S OLD RESIDENCE IN OAXACA " 136 POPOCA-TEPETL — THE SMOKING MOUNTAIN (l7,800 FEET HIGH) — FROM SACROMONTE " Xn$ ILLUSTRATIONS xi EL SENOR DEL SACROMONTE, THE MOST FAMOUS IMAGE IN MEXICO (1527) Facingp. I40 YZTACCfHUATL — THE WOMAN IN WHITE— 15,705 FEET HIGH " I42 A BIT OF OLD MEXICO — THE RUINS OF MITLA. ... " 144 IN A CIGARETTE FACTORY, MAZATLAN " 1 52 CHOLOS OF THE WEST COAST " 154 PLAZA AND CATHEDRAL, ACAPULCO " 1 56 THE STREET TO THE FORT " I58 THE OLD FORT, ACAPULCO " l60 THE RUBRICA OF SPAIN " 172 THE AND ALU Z AMERICANIZED " 1 74 YOUNG SPANISH-AMERICAN TYPE " 1 76 MAP OF MEXICO AWARENWfr 4*m THE AWAKENING OF A NATION If a rather particular friend of mine shall ever come to be Czar (and I have, after all, one or two reasons to hope he may not), his first concern will be to issue these edicts : I. A course of travel shall be compulsory for all able-bodied adult citizens. 2. No traveller shall print anything about any coun try whose language he cannot speak. By this two-edged ukase my friend — who is much of a bigot in some matters — would bring public en lightenment to bloom by cutting off the twin tap roots of ignorance. When no one can longer sit still in that birthright prejudice whereby we despise every thing we know nothing about, nor anybody again disseminate the uninspired guesses of a travelled bat, why, then, declares my friend, it will become impos sible for the world to keep on so stupid and intolerant as now. The fantastic notions of Mexico which are too much current among us are not to be wondered at — though not many of us are so ignorant as the Wash ington statesman — (a historic fact) — who gasped as the hack bowled him along the splendid Reforma on the evening of his arrival : " I never would have believed 2 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION it if I hadn't seen it!" he exclaimed. "Why, they have houses /" But our average innocence is enough. To the eternal race prejudice add that we are too drunken with our own progress to know or care much if there be more world beyond our fences ; that we have saved from Lour insular inheritance the ancient grudges, if not much else that is English ; that we still cultivate our foreign relations with a much more primitive im plement than the Mexican plough ; and that our ideas of the next-door republic are mostly derived from the typical Saxon "traveller" who roves deaf and dumb and with nose up — and it is inevitable that we should cherish a darkness which is one of the hardest things for our neighbors to understand. It is notorious to those who know both countries thoroughly that edu cated Americans are far more ignorant of Mexico than educated Mexicans are ignorant of the United States. One reason is, doubtless, that we are the more shin ing mark; but another is that the Latin -American nations have rather different ideas of a diplomatic service. They do not send to any country an am bassador who will be lost there without an interpreter. Even down to consuls this ridiculous superstition is operative. Men are selected who are at least gentle men in appearance ; who can command the respectful attention of business men ; who know how to ask for the information they desire. The result is that Mex ico is steadily informed of the moods and needs of this country. A decade has convinced me that Mexico is worth the better acquaintance of her neighbors; and a re view of our newspaper and book prints of the last few THE AWAKENING OF A NATION 3 years concerning Mexico, followed by a new over running of the republic, has not lessened my convic tion. It certainly seems that a little modern and in terior truth as to our next-door neighbor might be beneficial to us. We have had at least enough of the ragtag and bobtail Mexico, enough of the ancient and the picturesque — both fascinating, but both, as a rule, fearfully and wonderfully " done " ; for we have had too few Janviers, and only one Humboldt and one Bandelier. The books of charming literary im pressions of Mexico generally illustrate their authors rather than Mexico — as indeed they are meant to. But I have not yet seen Mexico given justice as a human quantity, an ambitious marcher in the procession of nations. And that is what she is — this American Cinderella, who is very like to surprise some of her supercilious sisters. Mexico is not Utopia. It is a very human country, with very human shortcomings. The nineteenth cen tury's end may be too early for us to allow that Prov idence personally created anything outside the United States ; but, at any rate, the apprentices who did some other portions of mankind were fairly competent. Of course the Armada is much more vital to Ameri cans than is the pioneering of America ; but in spite of our reasonable hostility to the Spanish blood, we must not give our eyes the lie. The fact remains that yonder disprized country is making a develop ment as wonderful as sudden ; that while our neigh borly backs were turned she has steppedout from her darkness, young, vigorous, clothed upon with all that gives dignity and stability to a nation, and girded as to her loins for the most practical of runnings. She 4 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION is no longer old Mexico, the romantic hag whose wrinkles and tatters we have found so grotesque. While we have been achieving a material develop ment, she has wrought the political and social miracle of the century. Within less time than has elapsed since our civil war invented millionaires, Mexico has stepped across as wide a gulf. From a state of an archy tempered by brigandage — wherein it was better to be President than to be right, and better to be a revolutionist than either — she has graduated to be the most compact and unified nation in the New World. She has acquired not only a government which governs, but one which knows how to govern — and contemporaneously a people which has learned how to be ruled. He should be a happy patriot to whom it is given to make his country a hundred times as good as he found it — a hundred times as contented, prosperous, and respected ; and that is what sort of fortune has befallen the creator of modern Mexico. Only those who seriously knew the country in the old days can at all conceive the change from the Mex ico of a generation back to the Mexico of now. There was no touring then, and nowhere was travel more unsafe. By every country road — even into the very heart of cities — the bandido robbed and murdered. Naturally. There was nothing else for him to do — unless to make a revolution, which requires brains and money. There were even Lady Turpins, and some of them were geniuses. Nor was there any special pau city of revolutions — and dozens of them were success ful. There were no railroads, no telegraphs, practically no commerce ; at the bottom of all, no security. It would be rather picturesque than scientific to say that THE AWAKENING OF A NATION 5 no man knew when he went to bed (and least of all the President) what the government would be in the morning; but the exaggeration is not wholly ridic ulous. To-day Mexico is — and I say it deliberately — the safest country in America. Life, property, human rights, are more secure than even with us. As for stability, the record speaks for itself. Mexico had sixty -two viceroys in 286 years, which is not very tumultuous ; but it also has had fifty-two presidents, emperors, and other heads in fifty-nine years of this century. Now, one President for twenty years. Some will say that this is not republican. Possibly not, but it is business. Among all the mistakes of for eigners as to Mexico, none is more groping than that which disparages its government. One must be care less either of the facts or of the English language to call that government a despotism. It is not even — to such as are jealous of accurate speech — a dictator ship. It is logical paternalism — a scheme frightfully dangerous under a bad father, incalculably beneficial under a good one. Mexico is an Absolute Republic — self-government in chancery ; free, in the upper sense, as we are, but less licensed ; happy, safe, prosperous under precisely the same system as that by which we administer our own homes — for in the family we are not yet ready to turn our minors over to their own head and the ward -heeler. And it is proud of the remarkable man who has done what no other ruler of modern times has even dreamed of being able to do, and who still keeps a quiet, steady fist in the waist band of the youngster he has taught to walk. As I have premised, Mexico is not perfect. Those 6 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION who best know it know best its faults. But though the temptation to be superior and critical is too much now and again for human nature to resist, I would rather take, on the whole, a more original line and tell more important truths than concern God's wisdom in making me smarter than the people among whom I travel. In a word, my hope is to convey some notion of the genuine Mexico I have watched for a decade, and have just now gone over anew for this express purpose. What shall be said is not guess-work, nor crumbs from the table of hotel hangers-on and refugee Americans and rented interpreters. It is the personal knowledge of a documentary student and field student who has followed Mexico from the dates of Ixtlilxo- chitl's mythography to within a week of this writing. I have just reinvaded nearly every state of the repub lic ; conversed by wholesale for nearly three months with every class, from the President down to the meanest pelado ; sounded millionaires and beggars, cabinet officers and muleteers, merchants, authors, street-car conductors, scientists, cargadores, mine-own ers, peons, railroad men, priests, professors, and bull fighters — and such responsible Americans as are to be had. It is no small pleasure to me that these chap ters, as they appeared in Harper 's Magazine, not only gratified patriotic Mexicans, but won the very gener ous and emphatic commendation of the Americans who most fully know and are most honorably known in that country. These personal facts have no merit except to in dicate an honest attempt to know the present pulse of Mexico. No man can reasonably estimate a coun try who does not know its people. If he goes dumb THE AWAKENING OF A NATION J and deaf among them, he is also half blind, for he cannot comprehend what he does see unless he knows why. And he cannot know a people until he has talked with them in their own tongue to something like the average length of his mind's tether and theirs. We need no enlightenment as to the value of a trav eller who adjudicates the United States on the strength of a fortnight's trip, burglar-proofed against our his tory and our language, guided by the axiom that wherein we resemble his home we are right and that wherein we vary we are wrong. It may be reasonable to presume that snap judgment is no more accurate elsewhere. Within ten years the brigands of Mexico have been simply wiped out. It has been — to such as know the geographical obstacles — a marvellous achievement; and the political difficulties were as great. First, whatsoever brigand was caught — and Diaz has a way of catching — stood just long enough in front of an adobe wall for the firing party to crook the right fore finger. There were no hung juries* nor pardon gov ernors, nor newspapers, novels, and plays to make heroes of the bandits. Second, the same hand — so firm and swift to justice — knew how to open an alternative door. Nowadays the bandit needs not. There is something else for him to do ; and he finds it not only * There are no " professional jurors " in Mexico. Nine of a man's peers try him, and a majority is a verdict. If the nine are unanimous, there is no appeal. To serve on a jury, one must have a diploma in law, medicine, or some other profession, or an income of $100 a month ; or must be member of a family whose head has an income of $3000 a year. 8 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION more salubrious, but more to his taste, to take a part in the development of the pdtria he was proud of even when he was her curse. He would rather upbuild than tear down, if he has a chance, even if there were no " Porfirio " and no rurales. I do not know anything in history which fairly par allels these twenty years in Mexico. No other man has taken a comparable dead-weight of population and so uplifted and transformed it. The wonder is all the more because to this day every other colony of Spain in the New World looks to be the worse off for the hidepende'ncia. Whatever we may say of the theory of self-government, in practice not one of them was ever so miserably viceroyed or captain-generalled as it has been presidented four-fifths of the time since 1821. Very much the same was true of Mexico until recent ly. It has had patriotic rulers sometimes; but that they were at last sorry rulers the very roster of them shows. Four or five presidents in a year is hardly an index of prosperity.* It is not far to remember when there was not a rail road in Mexico, and when other material conditions were in proportion. The actual Mexico has forty rail roads, with nearly seven thousand miles of track, and everything that this implies. Its transportation facil ities are practically as good as those of our Western States, and the investment is far more profitable. It is netted with telegraph lines (with the cheapest tariffs * Successively, for instance, in 1846, Arillaga, Bravo, Salas, Santa Anna, and Farias; in 1847, Santa Anna, Anaya, Santa Anna, Peila y Pefia and Anaya; in 1855, Santa Anna, Carrera, Alvarez, and Comonfort — etc. THE AWAKENING OF A NATION 9 in America), dotted with post-offices, schools, costly buildings for public business and public beneficence. It is freer than it was ever before — with free schools, free speech, free press. It is happier than ever before, and more prosperous than even in the bonanza days of the magnificent silver-kings of Zacatecas and Guan ajuato. There are degrees, of course, by local varia tion of impulse or of opportunity ; but there is prog ress everywhere — material, intellectual, moral. If the visible prosperity of Mexico, in the face of certain of its circumstances, shall seem enigmatic to sane people whose sane views are based on radically unlike surroundings, yet only ignorance can deny the fact. Mexico is admirably prosperous, in spite of seven years' drouth ; in spite of the Garza revolution (kindled in the United States, in ways and for reasons too complicated to be reviewed here) ; in spite of a national debt contracted when exchange was at from 8 to 16, and being paid with exchange at from 85 to 102 ; in spite even of cheap money. It has been a miracle of statesmanship, but a miracle which will never be repeated in a dissimilar land. I will try to explain, further on, how even so terrible a blow as the depreciation of silver was to Mexico has been turned to the advantage of a nation which lies in the hollow of one man's hand. Perhaps the two things which most impressed me in this fairly thorough review of Mexico were the fever of municipal improvement and the sheer epidemic of public schools. These are but logical features of the Diaz administration ; probably no more remarkable than the other methods of the digestion which has assimilated so chaotic a meal, but less familiar, since IO THE AWAKENING OF A NATION they are but now ripening to the harvest. Peace had first to be secured ; and that cannot be had until it is no longer possible for rebels to combine and drill by the month before the government even hears of it. Commerce comes after railroads, telegraphs, and har bors, and political reform after commerce. And only now is the country ripe for the other development which has loomed logical but late in the statesman ship of a decade. General Diaz came up by a revolution ; and that means debts as well as inheritances not of his choos ing. There were accidental allies to be considered, and hold-overs who could not be all at once swept away — for stability is the first need and the first duty of any government. But both these factors are now practically eliminated. Diaz has outlived nearly all his first associates ; and in one of the most extraordi nary games of chess ever played in statecraft he has shifted, cornered, or jumped the hold-over impossibles. There is left to-day in Mexico not one important fig ure that could by any reasonable probability set face against the government, nor one that is to its serious present discredit. The long era of dishonest officials, little and big, is past. There are no more brigand governors ; no more customs collectors wonted to " fix the accounts to suit themselves " — as a President^ once told a friend of mine to do. There is probably no other country in the New World whose whole pub lic service is to-day so scrupulously clean; and this large assertion is made neither carelessly nor ignorant- ly. One has not to remember long to a time when even the presidency of Mexico was a den of robbery; nor half so far to thievish governors and petty officials. THE AWAKENING OF A NATION II But the Diaz administration has never had a stain of its own ; and it has kept up its steady pressure until now not a state in the republic is spotted as to its local government. Even to one as familiar with the swift development of parts of our West as with the more conservative growth of our East, it is surprising to watch the gait of almost every Mexican city in municipal improve ments. Modern water-works to replace the fine old Spanish aqueducts ; modern sewerage to replace the street sinks of centuries; modern lighting, modern transit, modern health departments; public buildings better than our average towns of the like population think they can afford ; splendid prisons, markets, hos pitals, asylums, training-schools — these are some of the things the " despotism " of Diaz is planting through the length and breadth of the country. As for schools, it sometimes made me smile, but oftener turned my eyes moist, to note the perfect mania to have them — and to have them of the best. Every state capital has its free public " model schools," on which it lav ishes a wealth of love and money ; and the state ear nestly follows its lead. There is now in Mexico no hamlet of one hundred Indians, I believe, which has not its free public school. The summer of 1896 saw a radical change. Hitherto the schools of the republic had been in charge of the municipalities, the federal gov ernment aiding in their support with about $1,000,000 a year. In July the central government took direct charge of every public school in Mexico. This is to se cure homogeneity in the system. For the men and wom en now in charge of the schools of Mexico, I must admit that I have never met a more faithful and enthusiastic 12 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION corps ; and they are, on the average, very fairly fitted for their work. In every state there are normal schools, generously endowed by the government, for the fit training of these teachers ; and the attendance is encouragingly large. There are also countless in dustrial schools, art schools, professional schools, and the like, not to mention the host of private schools, of which some are entirely admirable. The teaching of religion in public schools is absolutely prohibited. " That," President Diaz said to me, " is for the family to do. The state must teach only scholarship, indus try, and patriotism. In the private schools we do not interfere with religious training. Beyond the standard we require of all, they may teach anything they like, so long as it is honorable and useful." The attitude of Mexico on this point is curious. There has been dis establishment throughout Spanish America, but it is not a usual sight to see a nation so rigidly, even so un mercifully, regulating the Church to which ninety-five per cent, of its population belong. The harsh laws of the Reforma — set by Juarez, and, curiously enough, maintained by Maximilian, who never could have sat down in Mexico at all but for the aid of the Church party in rebellion against the great Zapotec iconoclast — are still vital. Catholics have far less rope in Catholic Mexico than in the Protestant United States. Church processions are impossible — even a priest cannot legally walk the streets in his churchly garments. Probably a justifiable reaction against the tyranny to which centu ries of absolutism — such is our poor human nature — had corrupted the missionaries, the equal tyranny of their suppression is logically not to last. I seem to detect even now traces of its gradual coming to a juster aver- THE AWAKENING OF A NATION 1 3 age. There is talk that the Sisters of Charity may presently be allowed to return to Mexico ; and while I have no means of knowing that this is true, my very faith in human reason makes it seem probable. Those who have watched the Yellow Death when it walks a city of the tropics, who have seen men fall rotting by the curb, deserted by brother and mother, but picked up by these daughters of God — aye, and has himself felt their tender mercy upon his broken shell — such a one will hope for Mexico thus much alleviation of its severity. There is no danger that the old abuses will return. They were of their age, but are now as past as our Salem. II ASTIR IN THE NORTH ONE will look far in most countries to find a town of 20,000 souls which has more progressed in five years than has Chihuahua, the first place of consequence as one goes down from the United States by the chief railroad of Mexico — the Mexican Central.* Less than that time ago this enormous state was not the most scrupulously governed in the republic. Visibly and intrinsically it rather suggested that Mr. Tweed might be " running it." To-day Chihuahua is a happy state ; and its capital (of the same name) is almost a model little city. The Mexican commonwealths have all at last reasonable governors, but there are two eminent idols and figures of speech — Governor Reyes, of Nuevo Leon, and Governor Miguel Ahumada ; both magnif icent types of the physical man, and both executives for whom no state need blush. Perhaps only those who fully know the Latin -American character can guess how much of popularity this means : Not long * The " Symon Concession,'' subsidized at $9500 per kilo metre. San Luis Potosi also paid a subsidy on every kilo metre in that state. Work on the line was begun in Mexico May 25, 1880, and shortly afterwards from El Paso. The rails met at the bridge of Encarnacion March 8, 1884, and the road was opened in the following month. GOVERNOR MIGUEL AHUMADA, CHIHUAHUA ASTIR IX THE NORTH 1 5 ago a scrubby corrida precipitated a riot at the bull fight in Chihuahua ; the raging populace invaded the ring, smashing things, and bent on worse. Suddenly the giant form of the governor was seen elbowing among them, and in a twinkling his stentorian speech had swerved the mob from madness, and set them to shaking the skies with their " Viva Ahumada !" They gave their entrance money to a charity. But if this be insignificant to the stranger, the visi ble tokens of his progressiveness are all about the capital city of his state. Chihuahua has suddenly (within three years, that is) become populous with public schools, not to count several unusually good private ones. Instead of the former stuffy, rented rooms, there are cheerful, commodious, well-ventilated school -houses, with new American school furniture. Ahumada's special creation and pride are the free in dustrial schools, where rich or poor of either sex can have a utilitarian education. The Spanish had estab lished industrial schools in America two centuries be fore we dreamed of them ; but any one familiar with the Spanish system (which was merely the general mediaeval system) of education for women can appre ciate how typical of modern Mexico is this innovation. Indeed, I, who am not old, can remember when it would have been a miracle in New England. The Chihuahua training-school for girls has a hundred pupils. They learn (and by modern methods) book keeping, telegraph}-, type-writing, stenography, tailor ing, dress-cutting, machine knitting, etc., and of course English. President Diaz is not what the dilettante might term a savant. He was fitted for the law, but the whole trend of his education up to maturity was 1 6 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION military. Yet he is one of the most studious men I know. It is wholly within bounds to say that no other ruler of our times has studied so hard in office ; and he is, I believe, the only chief magistrate who ever added a new language to the accomplishments of his nation. In every public school of Mexico above the primary grade, in every private school, training- school, and college, English is a compulsory study. Spanish will never cease to be the language of half the area of this hemisphere, but in another generation Mexico is going to be equipped for business and pleasure in two languages — the two which dominate the Americas. Schools have always more or less appealed to me ; and with the sympathy for Latin America brought about by some alleviation of my first ignorances, the Latin- American school has been one of the most pathetic things I have known. But not in modern Mexico. I have never found brighter children, nor anywhere pupils so alert, as the thousands visited and talked with in this latest review of Mexico. There are degrees, of course, but all had such attention and such intention as were fit to make the blood tingle. Such vivid faces, such swift upward hands, such im petuous speech — and right as a trivet! I would like to see the seven-year-olds of the Escuela Anexa de Niflos, in Chihuahua, for instance, pitted against any similar school of ours in a sum in mental arithmetic. Not only in schools is Chihuahua awakened. The new state palace is a splendid building for the popula tion it represents. The alamedas, parks, paseos, owed originally to the matchless Iberian liberality with these breathing-places, are being improved handsomely. Few ANNEX-SCHOOL H)lt lioVS, CHIHUAHUA ASTIR IN THE NORTH 1 7 cities of ours of 20,000 inhabitants have anything like them. A first-class water system (based on the old Spanish aqueduct*), with all appliances for municipal and domestic use, has been completed recently ; and the same expert engineer is now putting in a modern drainage system — with even a sewage farm. It is a curious elbowing of old and new. The splen did parr6quia,f one of the finest cathedrals in Mexico, stands unchanged from the old days when it was built with $545,000 in contributions of a redl\ out of every mark§ of silver mined in the famous tiros of Santa Eulalia; but around it the spirit of the nine teenth century is at work. Electric lights, iron-foun dries, factories — even a quarter-million-dollar brewery — these are part of its new company. Beer is counted a missionary in Mexico — and not unwisely, if it may gradually wean the Indians from their benumbing pulque and inflammatory mescal. At any rate, there have come to be breweries all over the republic. A $20,000 hospital, just finishing, has been built actually by the people of Chihuahua ; and in an after noon's fair, in the beautiful park of Lerdo de Tejada, they raised $4000 to send to the widows and orphans of the men buried by a great " cave " in the Santa Eulalia mines. Such things indicate the stuff of which the tall Chihuahuans are made. As Colonel Ahumada is governor, so Don Luis Ter- * Begun in March, 1731 ; cost $119,003. The present system has a 70-foot head at the plaza, and can deliver over a million gallons daily in the driest season. t Founded 1727. t A recil is father of our " bit," the eighth of a dollar. § A marca of silver in Mexico is eight ounces. 2 1 8 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION razas is " King of Chihuahua." He has been more than once its governor, and it was he who made the really remarkable campaign which obliterated Victoria, the foremost of Apaches, and not only won for Chi huahua peace after harried generations, but did more for the quiet of our own Territories than any one else has done except General Crook. Don Luis owns hun dreds of leagues of Chihuahua, but is not an unpopular millionaire. When the new sewerage system for the city was projected, there was no hundred thousand dollars in the treasury for it. Governor Ahumada had in three years paid off the state debt, paid the debt of his predecessor's discreditable Temdsochic (Indian) war, paid the $123,000 for the new water-works, and paid up the salaries of the state officials, long in ar rears. But if the treasury was lean, Don Luis was not. He offered to lend the city the $100,000 for five years without interest — or longer if need be. This is mentioned not so much because it touches a man admired and loved by all who know him, as because it indicates the sort of citizens upon whom the guide of modern Mexico is able to count. There is a touching fitness in this swift uprising of Chihuahua by the paths of progress. One can half imagine the sweet, sad, inspired face which looks down from the tall shaft in the Plaza de Hidalgo taking on new sweetness as it sees at its very feet the fulfil ment of more, surely, than even Hidalgo ever dared hope. For next to the remote hamlet from whose church tower the patriot priest raised the midnight grito of Independence, Chihuahua is richest in mem ories of him. Here, in the bare room midway of the stone caracol in the tower of an unfinished Jesuit pwp DON LUIS TERRAZAS ASTIR IN THE NORTH 19 church,* the betrayed "Washington of Mexico" suf fered his last prison ; and where the graceful monu ment rises he was shot, with his companion heroes, eighty -five years ago. One cannot look upon that remarkable face and fancy that he doubted the out come; but even the faith of Hidalgo could not have bridged to the things that are. Almost where his ex ecutioners stood, to-day stands the state-house of a government of which any state might be proud; be hind his monument is the handsome and crowded state college; and, adjoining that, two model public schools. The blood of martyrs has been the seed of a free nation. There are in Chihuahua many other interesting things which I have never known discovered by the tourist ; but the aim of these articles is to point out not so much the old as the new. It may, however, be fit for remark that it is a happy city which can present at once the advantages of modern civilization and the romantic picturesqueness of an era forever fled ; and there is hardly a city in Mexico which has not these schools of the higher education of taste. Unlike enough to Chihuahua, but still in the cate gory of Mexican progress, are the little mining camps. Take, for instance, the hamlet of Sierra Mojada, in * Outside is a tablet bearing this (Spanish) inscription : " In this tower suffered his last imprisonment The Leader of the Independence Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, From the 23D of April to the 30TH of July, 181 i. This stone was put in place Dec. i, 1888." 20 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION the state of Coahuila, at the terminus of the most profitable railroad in America (since the Panama bo nanza has passed its palmy days). Sierra Mojada, said to be the most extensive carbonate camp in the world, may have in its group of villagelings two thou sand people. Of course it is too small to dabble much in municipal improvements; but the public school is here, well housed, well furnished, and alert as the next. Leon (founded 1576) is thus far one of the least progressive of Mexican cities. The mortal floods of 1888 (which so devastated Lagos also) came up to the plaza, and drove off 25,000 from its population of 105,000. Here are now 80,000 people without a bank — a case which cannot be paralleled elsewhere in the re public. I tried in vain at every considerable business house to sell a $5 gold piece for within a dollar's worth of exchange. Yet Leon is a prosperous and contented city, full of little and big manufactures of yarn, hats, zarapes, denims, soap, rebozos, saddles, har ness, and the beautiful charro suits of velvety kid-skin. And though behind its peers, it, too, is awakening to education and improvement. Its Teatro Doblado is surprisingly good; its Calzada ("Shod" park) impres sive with giant fresnos and a triumphal arch ; its market one any city of its size among us might envy. The Plaza de Armas is a particularly pleasing square, with its portales curiously Egyptianesque, their pillars painted red — and the cathedral, a whole square away from its legitimate Spanish- American place. Its schools are not up to the Mexican average. One of its hotels (De Diligencias) is more typical, and might be commended to our small-city bonifaces. For $1.75 silver (then about ninety cents gold) a day, I had a HIDALGO'S LAST PKISON ASTIR IN THE NORTH 21 scrupulous and very comfortable room upon the pretty patio, a desayiino, and two excellent six-course meals. Leon is the inevitable metropolis of one of the love liest and one of the most fertile basins of the Mexican plateau, and probably will not much longer lag behind its peers. Ill AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS Except the capital, historically the most attractive city of Mexico to the American student is Zacatecas, the Place of Grass.* Here were the first bonanza mines in the New World, and here sprung up the first American millionaires. Not only that, but here was coined the money which permanently colonized the first corner of what is now the United States. Few cities have a more romantic history .f In 1546 Joannes de Tolosa discovered the valley. Two years later he and his companions at arms — Cristobal de Ofiate, Baltasar Bafiuelos de Temino, and Diego de Ibarra— founded the city. The first mine located was that of San Bernabe ; but the one most important to us was the Tajos de Panuco, discovered by Ofiate in the same year (June 11, 1548). It was this mine which laid the corners of the first vast fort une in America — the fortune which founded New Mexico. Crist6bal de Ofiate was a typical cavalier — fearless, chivalrous, generous. For more then a gener ation his servants daily rang a great bell, and all came * This is the meaning of the Aztec word, the plural of zacatl. t Its charter was signed by Philip II. at San Lorenzo July 20, 1588. AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 23 who cared to and ate at his table. He founded the first chapel in Zacatecas — the little adobe pile known to - day as El Bracho, half a mile north of the city. His residence stood on the plaza, but modern build ings have usurped its place. His palace in the City of Mexico, next neighbor to the temple of Santo Domin go and the house of the Inquisition, survives ; its por- tales occupied by cobblers and vendors of artistic junk. His son Juan — unspoiled by the natal silver spoon — married a granddaughter of Cortes,* but had by his ambition a larger child than she bore him. He organized an expedition which cost half a million be fore it moved ; colonized New Mexico ; founded San Gabriel de los Espafioles (where Chama now is) in 1598, and Santa Fe in 1605 ; explored our country from northern Nebraska to the Gulf of California ;f and ap proved himself not only one of the most competent pioneers in American history, but an executive of high order. In our first pages there are few other figures so romantic and so stalwart as those of Juan de Ofiate and his comrades, the brothers Zaldivar (Juan and Vicente)^; and Gaspar de Villagran, the soldier-poet. Except Cerro de Pasco in Peru, and Potosi in Bo livia, there have never been silver-mines like those of * Dona Isabel Cortes Moctezuma. t It was on the latter remarkable march that he left his name on that quaint register of early explorers, the Morro, or " Inscription Rock," in western New Mexico. | Vicente de Zaldivar, hero of the most brilliant assault in all American history (the storming of the cliff "city" of Acoma, New Mexico, January 22, 23, and 24, 1599), founded the Jesuit college (for Indians) in Zacatecas in 1616. He married Maria de Ofiate, a daughter of Juan. 24 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Zacatecas and Guanajuato. Under the Spanish red- tape — one of the most complete routines in history — it is always possible to know just what was what. The Zacatecas mines have produced close on to a bill ion of dollars. The present output of the partido in precious metals is only about three and a half millions a year. Mining has shrunken of late — partly because of nine years' drouth in this state, partly because the rich need not imperil their money, and the poor have none to imperil ; partly because the most wonderful of the old bonanza mines are down to too much water (at 500 to 600 feet) to be overcome by mule-and-drum pumps, while the scarcity of fuel forbids steam. Still it can hardly be called stagnation when a state with half a million people (as Zacatecas has in its 65,000 square kilometres) produces in its worst year six and a third millions of dollars from mines alone. The ores are sulphites, " ruby," and some native silver. Fres- nillo is the only other partido that produces gold. Even aside from its associations, Zacatecas is full of charm. There are but two cities in the New World more picturesque — La Paz (Bolivia) and Guanajuato. The metropolis of the Choqueyapu would not count prior except for its red -tiled roofs (which are more beautiful than any gray flat azoteas), and for the blue- white glaciers of Illimani imminent above it. Zacate cas sags in the heavy lap of concentric hills. There is not a level street. As in La Paz, whatsoever way you go is up ; and it is not so well paved. But in the very elbows of its ways is dignity. No city north of the line is so stanchly built as this type of the Spanish- American capital. I do not understand a fate which has kept Ruskin from knowing the architecture which, AROUND THE PILA VILLAREAL, ZACATECAS AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS -."> more than any other, would have set his heart afire — at once the honesty of the sixteenth century, the Moresque art of Spain, the added massiveness taught by the eartliquake lands. First, of course, are the churches ; and through the five thousand north-and- south miles of Spanish America these form a series of monuments scarcely to be matched elsewhere. Pal aces, bridges, public buildings, even roads — all are fit for their company. One finds few things more dis couraging than to know well the architecture of Latin America and then come back to that of our contrac- tored cities. The chief landmark of Zacatecas — the hill on which Tolosa found the savages intrenched — is the striking hogback known as the £:tja. which does r:s? mean •• the buffalo." despite the beprinted tourist. The founders of the city were 7".\>y.?.-\v.>-/ and Bufj is the Biscayan word for :v"';>.J «v .v.:".'.* Up the flanks of this hill and those of its neighbors clamber the cubic houses of Zacatecas : and in the tortuous ravine are the towers and domes of a host of churches. The city is full of aqueducts, of which the chief is the fine league-long pile built by the corregidor Viliareal in the middle of the last century; a delightful setting for those who know ^as few seem to"* where to seek the most typical views of the Very Loyal and Very Noble Citv of the Nativity of Our Lady.4- The great curse * Pic's biadder. The word has also been adopted by Mexi can miners for what ours ca'.l a •blow-out.' T It was discovered on her feast-day. The coat o: arras , granted by Philip II.. i;SS^ was a shield showing tlie Bufa witii a silver cross on top. and the image of Our Lady in the face of the cli.i. Below, the coronal cipher of Fe'.ipe II. In 26 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION of Zacatecas is the scantiness and wretchedness of its limy water-supply. At the city pilas — notably that of the Plazuela Villareal — the procession of water-carriers is amazing and pathetic. Women, dipping with their gourd omates a drop at a time from the crowded basin, take two hours sometimes to fill their shoulder-load ollas. But with all its airs of antiquity — its vast old churches, its hotels housed in splendid convents, and its populous state-prison, quartered in the bulk of San to Domingo and the Inquisition until such time as a model penitentiary can be built, its multitudinous Re beccas at the well, its mining "patios" all the way down the cafion, its warped streets — the virus of the new has " taken " in Zacatecas. It is not so unusual that a quarter-million-dollar theatre (the "Calderon") is being finished as I write ; for splendid theatres are rather likelier to be found in Latin America than else where in this hemisphere.* Nor are hospitals an in novation, in the country which had better ones three centuries ago than there were in England. But a strict ly modern hospital, costing $250,000, is nearly finished in Zacatecas ; and its appointments are new, if its aims are not. The schools are in excellent condition, and progressing. The respective normal schools for males and females, the preparatory schools, the Insti tute of Sciences (engineering, law, medicine, etc.), are all well filled and well conducted. It goes without the upper corners, the sun and moon. In the skirts of the cliff, the portraits of the four founders, with the motto " Labor om nia vincit." In the border, five fists of arrows and five of bows. * For instance, such as the " Degollado " in Guadalajara, or the Parthenon in the city of Guatemala. ZACATECAS— THE BL'FA AND THE AQUEDUCT VILLAREAL AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 27 saying that the Church has theological schools here, as everywhere else. The state of Zacatecas has 240 schools for boys, 169 for girls, and 166 mixed — the last for populations too small to have " separate " schools. It is curious to note that the average annual pay of male teachers is $415 ; of female, $505. The enrollment of these schools (1895) was 19,251 boys and 12,061 girls. At Guadalupe, three miles south of the city, is the hospicio, or asylum, with 222 boys and 150 girls. This is typical in every one of the United States of Mexico. An orphan babe can be, on the day of its birth, placed in a governmental orphanage, where it will be tender ly reared and trained up to six years old. Without the loss of a day it can then be put in an hospicio, to be educated and taught a trade and maintained until its majority — twenty-one years of government father ing. Possibly it may become us, in our present cir cumstance, not to look down too disdainfully upon a nation which is doing this for its foundlings, and so much for its children in general.* There are naturally various grades of merit among the hospicios, but their average is high, and some of them are among the most admirable public institutions I have known. The state college of Zacatecas is full ; and so are the professional schools. As in every other Mexican city nowadays, there are also free night schools for the working-classes. Relatively dull as Zacatecas is, it is in striking contrast to an ex-bonanza in the United States, as these very facts point. It (like its types in all * It is also fair to mention the fact that infanticide, in any "degree," is a civilized invention as yet wholly unknown in Spanish America. 28 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Spanish America) was not merely a place for gutting the earth. Even among miners was the home idea as it never was with our Virginia Cities. If Zacatecas and La Paz dispute precedence in picturesqueness, there is no question about Guana juato. It is the most picturesque city in the New World, the delight and despair of the artist — who can never get it all, nor rest short of getting all he can. More huddled and more distorted than Zacatecas, climbing to every point of the compass by white steps from the great ravine into which it looks to have rained, twisted in every street to the whim of the way ward hills, uneven, indirect, and lawless, it is the most artistic of cities. Areas of it (particularly against San Miguel and its opposite hill) are vividly like Jerusa lem ; but the Holy City is a comparative toy. In parts it is wonderfully suggestive of the prehistoric terraced pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona — but vastly greater. First and last, it is — itself : a special standard of reckless beauty. Arrieros tramping to Zacatecas behind their cargo- mules in 1554 discovered Guanajuato,* and the usual swift development followed. In the beginning of this century Humboldt found two Guanajuato mines — the famous " Conde de Valenciana" and the " Marques de Rayas " — producing annually 550,000 marks (4,400,000 ounces) of silver— one-seventh or one-eighth of the entire American output. From January 1, 1787, to June 11, 1 791, the Valenciana yielded 13,896,416 * It became a villa (town) by royal grant of 1619; and in 1741 a city full-fledged. A BIT OF GUANAJUATO AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 29 ounces of silver, its ore averaging a little over 100 ounces to the ton. Though flooded, this fine old mine is still far from exhausted. One could write a volume of fascinating true incidents (eliminating the equal fables) of the old Mexican mines — even a volume on those of Guanajuato. It was the inevitable story, even where camp fires roasted silver buttons from the soil — the accident by which so many famous Mexican mines were discovered. There were wonderful fort unes, and streets paved for squares with silver ingots for the christening procession of some purple-born, and twenty-ton silver railings for a church altar, and all that ; and there were — the other fellows. Agustin de Zavala, nearly three centuries ago, after paying $800,000 in fifths to the king from his mine, was buried by charity. Bartolome Bravo de Acufia ren dered unto Caesar the quintas that were Caesar's, to the tune of a million and a half — and his heirs had not even a house to live in. They were robust in virtue as in vice, these cavaliers of early Mexico — like Don Manuel Correa, the miner who won $18,000 at cards one night, and next day gave it and $7000 more to the Convent of San Agustin — which is still one of the landmarks of Zacatecas, though now a hotel not con ducive to piety.* * In 1575 Don Geronimo de Orozco, President of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara, authorized the founding of this con vent, and the land was given a year later. It was the above- mentioned bonanza-king, Zavala, who built the present edifice at his proper cost, in 1613. Under the Reforma (1857-1860) the property was " denounced " by General Jesus Gonzales Ortega, and bought in by him for a song. The convent was made into a hotel — as noble in architecture as it is wretched 30 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION There was some difficulty in spending a bonanza income. The flooded mine of the Quebradilla was taken up by a company and drained at a vast ex pense, but cleared over $200,000 for them. In 1775 another great drainage tunnel was constructed, and the operators made $2,000,000. At the beginning of the last century the Pabellon de Sombrerete paid its three owners $20,000 a day for five years ; and it has produced in all two hundred millions of dollars. One Zacatecas miner paved the street with ingots from the Casa de Gobierno to the Parrdquia (between fifty and sixty yards) for a christening procession. In 1800 the Viceroy Azanza passed a bando forbidding godfathers to fling handfuls of coin into the street on such oc casions. It was easy come, easy go, as always where there are bonanzas; with the one difference that even a parvenu Spaniard spends his money not like a par venu, but like a prince. The first Conde de Valenciana came to America not a pauper, but a poor man. In the best year he took out from his famous mine $1,200,000 net; and in the last quarter century of his life the clear annual output of that worthy hole in the ground was never under $400,000. It used a lit tle matter of eighty tons of powder a year. He was counted a man of greatly conservative and moderate in service — in 1863. The Presbyterians bought the church portion of the building for $25,000 (possibly one-sixth of its value) and dedicated it to their services in July, 1882. The American missions to "convert" Mexicans from one Christian church to another meet a notable tolerance in Mexico, con sidering their errand, and maintain small congregations of the lower class, who attend for motives not wholly unselfish or religious. AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 3 1 life, and certainly was not of those who threw money at the birds ; but he left an estate of only $2,000,000 * outside of the mine. The Marques de Fagoaga took out a net $4,000,000 in six months from one vein in Sombrerete. Not long before the beginning of this century the Fagoaga family lent a friend $700,000 without interest — and the friend lost it all in trying to find a mine as rich as the " Veta Negra " of Sombrerete. " Princely," after all, seems a rather laggard word to keep up with this sort of thing — or with the like free hand of the Count of Regla. That cavalier (whose fortune spouted from the smitten rock of La Vizcayna, near Pachuca) built in Havana two of the largest ships of the line (112 guns) of solid mahogany and Spanish cedar, and presented them to his sovereign as blithely as one might send up a bouquet. He also lent the crown $1,000,000. In Tasco f a French miner, Joseph de Laborde, " struck it rich" in the Canada de Tlapujahua. By way of gratitude he built (about 1650) the splendid church there, and endowed it. The building alone cost him upwards of $400,000. It may be added that these are not " prospector's assays." A man did not " boom " his mine in the days when a deadly fifth of its product went to the crown. The figures for Mexican mines under the Spanish regime are assessor's figures, not the ciphers of stock-markets. And I wish to point the serene * The mine had a good appetite, for one thing. Three of its shafts cost $1,800,000'. t The ancient Tlaxco, where was the first "coinage" in the New World. Certain little hatchets of bronze were made there for currency. Whence the corrupted name " tlaco " or " claco " for the smallest Mexican copper coin. 32 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION truth that amid all the splendor, the display, the cor rupting waste of Spanish mining in all America, there was never the remotest taint of the cold, cutthroat manipulation which has characterized " American " mining after the simple placers. The mines of Span ish America always were (and still are, except in some cases of foreign ownership) worked as mines and not for the stock-market. Perhaps no one can quite spell the difference to whom " Con. Virginia " is but a name. It is also fit to say just here that while, as in min ing always, there was tremendously in Mexico (more than with us, since we have never had at all the same conditions of labor in any of our mining for the precious metals) the vast disparity of classes, it is wholly un warranted to speak of the down-treading of the Indian laborers. They were poor only as a man is poor whose enough is little. They were not (despite the arm-chair historian) slaves. There was no mita in Mexico; no compulsory labor in mines; no labor without wages. The Indian who did not like the mine, or its administrador, or its wages, was perfectly free to go elsewhere — or to stay out altogether. "Nowhere," said Humboldt, at the beginning of this century, " do the common people enjoy the fruits of their labor more than in Mexico. The Indian laborer is poor, but he is free. His condition is much prefer able to that of the peasantry of a large part of northern Europe y* In 1557 the "patio process" of treating silver ores was invented in Pachuca by a miner who deserves im- * Essai Politique. THE MOLINO — ORE-CRUSHKR AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 33 mortality, Bartolome de Medina. About 70 per cent. of the silver mined in Mexico since has been treated by that process. In five years Zacatecas had already thirty-two haciendas for this method of bencficiando. All the way up the cafion, from Marfil to Guanajuato, these interesting establishments can be seen in opera tion — the slow-trundling dry-crusher, the stone-tub arrastra which grinds wet, the huge patio with its mud " omelet " salted with quicksilver and stirred by pa tient blindfold mules and bare-legged peons. For the average silver ores of Mexico this is the cheapest and best reduction, the normal loss being less than 6 per cent. This cafion of Marfil is as interestingly typical of Spanish America as the like area well can be. Its roadway, its splendidly walled ravine, and its feudal castles of reduction works (which look rather less like what our mills are than like what our public buildings might be) are impressive even to the traveller by the intermittent mule -car, and an unfading memory to those who seriously explore it all. As at Zacatecas, and for the same reasons, mining in Guanajuato is dull. Yet it goes on steadily. A curious company (American, of course) has recently been formed to "wash" the bed of the little river — down which, in three centuries and a half, some five hundred millions in silver and mercury is computed to have run away. But if the mines just now lag, Guanajuato does not. The capital of its state, it is the home of a good governor, and its hunchbacked streets echo progress. The city is spending about $150,000 a year on municipal improvements — something fair for a town of 25,000; and contrast enough to the bo- 34 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION nanza days when 8000 people died in Guanajuato of famine.* The present administration has completed the Tea- tro Juarez, the most splendid theatre in Mexico, if not in America. Beautiful modern residences are springing up along the picturesque ravine which winds down from the newer reservoir Presa de la Olla. The city has a first-class high-pressure water-service, and, of course, electric lights — as has every Mexican popula tion of any consequence. The schools are populous and prosperous. The state college has 300 pupils. The ancient mint, which has coined so many hundreds of millions, is still at work ; the noble old churches (like the Cathedral, the Parrdquia, and San Diego with its carved porphyry) hold their own — and their next neighbor is to be a modern system of sewerage. It is one of the typi cal anachronisms of Mexico the new — this picturesque city, which was already luxurious a century before any population of 20,000 English-speaking people was in the New World, still full of its ancient landmarks, yet with the facilities of the nineteenth century's end. Telegraph, telephone, electric light, and their concom itants are everywhere in Mexico. As for the phono graph, an enterprising Mexican lady lamented to me the other day that she had lost several thousand dol lars by her investment, the invention was already so vulgarizado in all parts of the republic. As for terri tory, that tributary to Guanajuato and Zacatecas is second to none in the world — the richest silver depos its and the most fertile fields in alliance. Nearly a * A black frost on the 28th of August, 1784, killed the corn. In all Mexico, that year, 300,000 perished of the Hunger. THE PATIO PROCESS, GUANAJUATO AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 35 hundred years ago the greatest of cosmographers de clared that the best lands of New Spain were those which stretch from Salamanca past Silao to Leon. The mines, of course, developed the vast garden which to-day is the wonder of the traveller that fairly measures it ; and now the child supports its (tempo rarily, perhaps) infirm parent. It is curious to remem ber that ninety-three years ago Guanajuato was the second largest city in the New World — Mexico being first and Havana third. Queretaro — significant to the historian as the last page in the tragedy of poor, well-meaning, weak- jawed Maximilian ; and fascinating to the collector as the home of the most beautiful opals (if he knows how to find them) — is no less attractive to the econo mist. Its charming plaza, fine churches, admirable market, impressive aqueduct,* and rich associations of history are not so typical of awakening Mexico as are its suburban industries. A scant league south are the magnificent Hercules cotton-mills, the model factory, perhaps, of America ; and nearer the centre, the hardly less important annexes for making prints, etc. Founded by the Spaniard Cayetano Rubio a generation ago, at a cost of several millions, these mills are now owned by a Spanish-English stock com pany. Over 1700 operatives are employed, and every department is fitted with the finest modern machin- ery.f Wages range from twenty-five cents a day (for * Built 1726-1738, at a cost of $124,791. t In 1803 Queretaro had twenty obrdjes (factories) and three hundred home looms, consuming about eight hundred tons of wool a year. 36 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION the cheapest boys) up to five dollars, the ordinary workman receiving seventy -five cents. I know no factory in the United States which is such a mission ary of beauty to its employees. Its lovely patios of tropical flowers, its fountains, its $18,000 Carrara mar ble Hercules at the main mill, and other fine statues at the annexes — these are educators not many cor porations give their workmen. But this eye for the artistic is rather habitual in Mexico, and the usual factory there is beautified in a way that would seem absurd to many of us. Possibly such settings as those of Hercules, of La Constancia (near Puebla), of the mills of Orizaba, and others, are not going to affect the mind of the operative. Possibly, also, Evolution is a fool. Nothing is more characteristic of the present Mexico than the multiplying of manufactures. There are countries in America where million-dollar factor ies are not exactly springing up; but Mexico is of another catalogue. At the falls of Juanacatlan — the Niagara* of Mexico — a 28,000 spindle cotton-mill, to employ a thousand operatives, is just ready for work. On the Rio Blanco, near Orizaba, a four-million-dollar cotton-mill is building. About Puebla half a dozen are going up, costing from a quarter of a million to a mill ion apiece, besides the extensive establishments which have so long prospered Puebla. And so nearly all over the republic. It is significant, too, that this new development has yet barely begun in the richest por tions of Mexico. If such progress has come in the * If you will oblige me, let us call this, as its Indian god fathers did, Nee-a-gah-ra ; and not for the moment forget that sonorous vocable in our flat corruption of it. 3HX -1 0 M O 'OSVJ.HH.I.lO '.101.UO - .1 SO.l a Hi ;10 im\ V -.1 H.lO.i AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 37 dry corners, what will it be when the tropic wealth of Guerrero, Vera Cruz, Chiapas, and the like shall be exploited? So many tourists judge Mexico by the arid steppes of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Zacatecas — the thousand half-desert miles they traverse between our border and the capital — never guessing that while this bare plateau is so much of Mexican geography, it is so little of Mexican resources. The huge and marvel lously rich west coast ; the big, luxuriant group of southern states ; the smaller but magnificent Gulf low lands — these are what are to make Mexico. No other country on this continent runs such a gamut of climates, and therefore of natural products. And the nation which, ever since the beginnings of American history, has been pre-eminent by her mines, is now to be richer in the output of her furrows. If schools, municipal improvements, railroad and harbor develop ment, and factories have become suddenly epidemic, the renaissance of agriculture is no less remarkable — or, rather, the invention ; for it is the first time in Mexican history that the soil has really been called upon to declare itself. The Spanish crown colonized the New World by the only effective policy, of which a large feature was the grant of enormous areas to deserving pioneers. It was part of the statecraft which is still the wonder of the scholar ; and it was approved by its result — the most successful uphill colonization in human history. But now America is settled, and land grants and un taxed principalities are outgrown. For centuries the revenues of Spanish America have been derived from everything except the one safe, ultimate basis. Im port and export duties, stamp acts, fifths, license taxes, 38 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION inter-state taxes, city front-door taxes — everything but a tax on land. For three hundred and fifty years the mediaeval alcabalas have been adding new barbs to the fences between state and state. It was almost a civil war of finance. Each state made its own duties, to protect its own products and discriminate against those of its neighbors. It became almost as astound ing an economic fetichism as the notion (said to be visible in a country I have heard of) that all you have to do to make money " easy " is to make plenty of whatever you may choose to call money. It is need less to add that these inter-state fences had largely paralyzed internal trade. But all that is swept away. Several years ago Diaz abolished the alcabala chiquita — the petty tax on back- loads. On the 1st of July, 1896, he put in force the most important economic change that ever befell Mexico. For the first time in three and a half cen turies the garitas (municipal customs -gates) of all Mexico stood open and unguarded. The alcabalas were wiped out. Wondering Indians with burro train or gunwale-deep chalupa waited, sneaked ahead, looked back for some one to rush out and tax them for enter ing town. They had heard of it — but who would be so many fools as to believe that there was no more toll at the garita ? I watched the morning and noon and night of that great day for Mexico, and it was as pathetic as humorous. Those who have scoured the republic with a few gross of photographic plates, or some like prey of the local tax-collector, can realize what it means to be able now to enter any city un- harassed, after once being registrado at the national frontier. ENTRANCE TO THE HERCULES .Mills AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 39 No other one piece of legislation has meant so much for Mexico ; and it is characteristic of Diaz. It has been the vision of a generation. No revolution since the Reforma but has had for a chief rallying- cry "Down with the alcabalas!" Yet any government which had dared abolish them would have been over turned in a month. It means coming to the sane final tax on lands; therefore the breaking up of the enormous uncultivated holdings — distinctly legislation favorable to the poor and (temporarily) unfavorable to the rich — and it would have meant a revolution wherever there was a wealthy hacendado. Even Diaz dared not make this tremendous innovation three years earlier. This " dictator " is a rather conservative ruler. Through at least a decade he has waited pa tiently for time to ripen to this change ; and his judg ment of season is approved by the result. These mill ions of revenue* have to be made up. It means a notable stiffening of the " direct contribution " ; but though business-men have growled at paying the im mediate piper, they realize that the enormous internal development which is inevitable under the new dis pensation will more than repay them. By the way, it is curiously significant of simpler- hearted stages of the world how trades are still differ entiated in Mexico. Broadly speaking, one may know a man's derivation by his shop ; for the exceptions are only enough to prove the rule. Textile manufact ures are controlled by Mexicans and Spaniards ; the sugar output by Mexicans ; and, rather oddly, most of * The garita of the capital alone produced seven millions a year. 40 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION the bakers are of the same blood. Brewing is in the hands of Alsatians. Shoemaking is mostly done by Mexicans, with some Spaniards ; and contractors and dealers in material are Mexicans. Plumbers are Eng lish ; bicycle, sewing-machine, and agricultural imple ment men mostly Americans, of course — as are also most of the railroad men. The dry -goods trade throughout the Republic is mostly in the hands of Frenchmen ; so are the tailor shops. The shirtmak- ers are French and Spanish ; the large jewellers all Germans (and mostly Jews), the innumerable small ones Mexican and Spanish — a cropping-out of hered ity, perhaps, from the Arabs who invented timepieces. The hardware shops are kept by Germans, the grocery stores all by Spaniards, the smithies by Mexicans — as are the tinshops, saddleries, and butcher shops. Cigars and cigarettes (the only forms in which Mexican to bacco is marketed) are manufactured almost exclu sively by Spaniards and Mexicans, though in the capi tal two important French firms are now in the trade. One of the latter (the Buen Tond) is among the largest and best equipped cigarette factories in the world. It is a co-operative concern, with 1300 employees besides the clerical force, runs 150 cigarette machines, and uses up 8000 pounds of tobacco a day. It has its own electric-lighting plant and lithographing establishment, and its capital is a million. It went into the manu facture of unglued cigarettes while we were still smok ing five per cent, paste. Every Mexican city has still its own tobacco factories, extensive in the aggregate at least, though now scattered and averaging smaller than when the weed was a monopoly of the crown. In 1803, for instance, the Royal Factory at Queretaro AMONG THE OLD BONANZAS 41 alone (far enough from the fields) had 3000 opera tives, of whom 1900 were women, and turned out over $2,200,000 worth of cigars and cigarettes a year. These early factories, like the vast majority of the present small ones, produced hand -made goods ex clusively. IV SURFACE GOLD For three hundred and fifty years Mexico has been rich by not much else than mines; and a fantastic, perilous wealth it is. As every student of mining countries knows, the life is a kaleidoscope of extraor dinary contrasts ; crazy luxury and great misery ; the few rich, the many poor ; the carelessness of all other than money standards ; the looseness which accom panies any form of gambling. It is a glittering, bar baric life, but not just what the soberest patriot would wish to befall his native country. But to-day — though it is a conservative estimate that not 10 per cent, of the mineral wealth of Mexico has been exploited — mines are becoming a secondary con sideration. Not that they are failing, but that other in dustries are being born. Commerce, growing through the new and costly harbors and the lavishly subsidized railroads ; the product of multiplying mills ; the swift, new development of agriculture — these are the safer bonanzas which are engaging more and more attention, not only from Mexicans, but from the increasing army of foreign investors. Cereals are always a heavy fac tor in the national output. Already at the beginning of this century they ran up to about $24,000,000 a year, which somewhat exceeded the production of pre- SURFACE GOLD 43 cious metals; and the disparity has rapidly increased since. Corn has always been the chief vegetable product of America, whence the Spanish conquest first gave it to the Old World. A century ago the annual yield in Mexico was about 25,000,000 bushels. It still holds its own as king of cereals in this hemisphere. Wheat, of course, is not a native American. Its first introduction to the continent was in Mexico. A negro slave of Cortez found three or four grains of it among the rice of his rations, and planted them with due care — before 1530.* From this humble and acci dental beginning great things have come. In Europe, wheat produces about fivefold ; in Mexico, anywhere from twenty- two-fold to one hundred-fold. Its aver age productiveness is in Mexico five times what it is in fertile France. Potatoes, which are native to Ecuador and Peru, were unknown in Mexico until after the Conquest ; but are now produced in abundance and fine quality. Tomatoes, as the name implies (Aztec " tomatl ") are indigenous. So is the oca (oxalis tuberosaX and so are cochineal, f several varieties of anil (indigo ; the name is a corruption of the Arabic nir-o-nil ; it was the ink of the conquistadores up to 1550); and so is the utile * Thus antedating Peru, where Dofia Maria de Escobar planted a few stray grains and distributed the crop, twenty kernels at a time, to the colonists. Fray Jose Rixi introduced wheat into Ecuador. f This insect tenant of the cactus, now neglected, was of enormous importance in olden Mexico. At the beginning of this century the exports amounted to over three million dol lars. Cholula alone in 15S1 produced 100,000 pounds. 44 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION maguey (agave Americana). This latter is perhaps the most characteristic vegetal product of Mexico. Next to corn and the potato, it is the most useful plant of highland America. Nothing else in Mexican agri culture is so striking as the vast maguey plantations — which are at their perfection in the valleys of Apam, Cholula, and Toluca. It was not only the fibre-supply for the ancient makers of paper, but was already be fore the Conquest, as it is to-day, the vegetable spring whence flowed the chief drink of Mexico. An idea of its importance economically may be had from the fact that the railroads centering in the City of Mexico are now receiving $40,000 a week, the year through, in freights on pulque alone. Humboldt noted an Indian woman who died in Cholula, during his stay there, and left her heirs a maguey plantation worth $80,000. Mescal, the aloe brandy, is colorless, high-proof, and quite undeserving of the jeers of travellers more con cerned to be smart than to be exact — or who sample the worst they can find. It is pure, less marked in taste than any unadulterated grape brandy, and, though potent as spirits of such proof are meant to be, is unpursued by swollen after-thoughts. The ex cellence of that of Tequila has caused good mescal in general (and sometimes bad, among bad dealers) to be called by that marca. Mescal already begins to be shipped to France, and will be more so. It is worth four bits the gallon, out-bound, and $4 the bottle (plus label) when it returns as cognac to the United States. Cotton is foreordained to be one of the chief pro ductions, as it is already the chief staple of manufact ure. It is native to the soil, and was cultivated and woven by the prehistoric Mexicans. The production SURFACE GOLD 45 of it is not so large as it should be — and as it will be when the matchless cotton -lands from Sinaloa to Colima and along the Gulf coast shall come into play. Mexican mills are at present importing a million and a quarter of dollars' worth of cotton from the United States annually ; but the quantity is decreasing about 30 per cent, a year as home production advances. Coffee is just now the shibboleth, and great areas are being planted. In 1897 the coffee crop will be twice what it was in 1896, and by 1899 it will have doubled again. In 1894-95 it had increased twenty- four-fold in nine years. To the United States alone, in the year ending June 30, 1897, Mexico sent near ly 29,000,000 pounds of coffee. It is probably just as well for the foreigner in Mexico to plant something else for the present — bearing in mind the price of potatoes in California in '49 and '50, and of latter-day oranges. Mexican coffee bears comparison with any in the world, and is already largely cutting into our im ports from Brazil and Guatemala ; but markets never thank those that hurry them. Chocolate has a great future in Mexico, as it had a prehistoric past. Its very name is Aztec — chdco-latl. It was a favorite drink there 500 years ago ; and the cacao nuts were the first Mexican currency. To this day no one knows the inner meaning of a cup of chocolate who has not been initiated in Mexico or Peru. Thousands of square miles of Mexico are per fectly adapted to the growing of cacao ; but at pres ent little attention, relatively, is paid this promising crop. The same may be said of vanilla, another na tive product. Most of what is raised comes from Vera Cruz and Oaxaca. 46 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Financially one of the most important vegetal prod ucts of Mexico, in esse and still more i?i posse, is to bacco.* The average American knows about his cigar — what it cost ; and prefers to smoke a name. In time, however, he will learn. Mexico raises tobaccos of the finest quality — as well as many that are medium. The weed of Tepic is admirable ; that of San Andres de Tuxtla superior ; and as for Huimanguillo, there are not a dozen Habana brands that come anywhere near it. In Mexico an American can buy for five cents gold literally the best " smoke " he ever knew ; and for two cents far better than he is accustomed to at home. As for the universal cigarette, a very ill sort (yet better than our best) may be had in Chihuahua, native ; whereas some marcas of Orizaba and Vera Cruz are, without exception, peerless. Mexican tobac co, though mostly consumed at home, is making head way against tradition. For the year ending June 30, 1897, we bought in the United States nearly $300,000 worth of it — an increase of about 95 per cent, over the year preceding. Rubber — which becomes more important every year, as we need more and find less — is an industry barely born in Mexico. There are but two planta tions of over 5000 trees ; yet millions of acres in the republic are as perfectly adapted to caoutchouc-cult ure as the most favored spots in the Amazonas of Peru. It grows wild on the Pacific slope of Oaxaca ; in Chiapas, the Tabasco, Campeche, Tuxtepec (up to the river Quiotepec), on the Coatzacoalcos, etc. The * It is curious that this now universal word is Arua, and na tive of Hayti. It properly means pipe. The Nahuatl name of the leaf is yetl ; the Incas called it sairi. SURFACE GOLD 47 enormous backbone of Mexico — the 2000-mile north- central plateau, of 4000 to 8000 feet elevation — is al ready an important cereal country, and scientific irri gation, such as we have in California and Arizona, will vastly multiply its product. Every fruit grows in Mexico ; broadly speaking, no fruit whatever (ex cept strawberries) has ever been really cultivated there. I have never found a strictly first-class orange below the Tropic of Cancer; but when the grower shall learn to prune and cultivate, there is no knowing what he may harvest. Bernal Diaz introduced the orange into Mexico over three hundred and fifty years ago, but until recently it has never cut a large figure for exportation. This year the sister republic sends us more than a quarter of a million dollars' worth, marking an annual increase of about 20 per cent, in the industry. If culture does for fruit here what it has done elsewhere, Mexico — so much nearer our great markets — is like to have something to say in them, to the distinct disadvantage of certain remoter sources of present supply. As for strawberries, Izaak Walton should have lived to visit the Irapuato of to-day. Not so much for the six-pound basket ol fresas he can buy at the train for two bits — and the basket alone is worth that — but to go to the gardens. There he would conclude that God not only could but did make a better berry than the angler's friend ever knew. This is but a small enumeration of the agricultural riches of Mexico, though it covers the large items. It omits the precious woods (and in dyewoods alone the one state of Campeche does a million dollar business yearly) ; the silk - culture, to which large areas are per- 48 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION fectly adapted ;* rice, which will be a great matter; cane-sugar, which is manufactured on an enormous and fast- rising scale, the venerable traplches giving way to modern machinery,f and a score of other im portant products. Between the extremes of its mar vellous climatic range from tierra caliente to tierra fria, Mexico can produce, and commercially, not alone every article she needs for herself, but (as Humboldt justly observed) every crop known to the civilized world. Despite its latitude, two -thirds of its lands belong to the temperate zone, and only one-third to the tropics. Sitting astride the longest mountain system on earth, its head touches the eternal snows, while its feet dabble in seas of everlasting summer. It is competent to support — and well— a population of at least seventy-five millions. These observations are sketchy, but they are typical indices of the new life in the northern and poorer half of the republic. To understand broadly all the mean ing of this regeneration, one must come intelligently to the palatial city which has been by turns Tenochtitlan, the ancient pueblo of the Nahuatl confederacy ; the gorgeous capital of the viceroys ; and (now) the model of a nation — the head and heart of modern Mexico. * In the summer of 1896, a striking display of silk-growing was made in Irapuato with due rejoicing, where Hip61ito Chambon is father of the modern industry. Cortez himself in troduced the mulberry and silkworm ; and by 1560 there was a considerable production of silk about Puebla, Panuco, and Oaxaca. t The first caha duke in the New World was planted in Santo Domingo by Pedro de Atienza in 1520, and soon spread to Cuba and Mexico. Cortez built a crushing-mill near Cuyua- can, and devised it to his heirs. THE HEART OF THE NATION It has pleased that certain class of historians whose emotions swell with distance and the dark to depict the Spaniard as having destroyed some Utopian civil ization of the Aztecs and replaced it with his inferior own. To this amiable freak of prejudice and the arm chair there is but one competent answer — go and see. In science, at least, we are lapsing from that fine hon esty of the good old times when it was deemed per fectly fit to play Recording Angel to lands and peoples we had never clapped eye on. Thanks to the non- romantic school, wherein Lewis II. Morgan and his cumulative successors have replaced closet guess-work and rhetorical trances with common-sense and docu mentary research and the field, we know now just what the "empire" of "Montezuma" was. It is in structive to stand here in the heart of what was once the chief pueblo of the Nahuatl confederacy — of tribes banded for immunity in robbing their neighbors — and look and remember. Civilization is measured by its fruits of hand and head and heart. Just yonder was the reeking teocalli, upon whose pyramid five hundred captives in a day had their still-contracting hearts flung before Huitzilo- pochtli, and their carcasses kicked down the staircase 4 50 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION to be ceremonially devoured by the multitude — where stands now the largest Christian church in America, and one of the noblest. To the left, on the ground where dwelt the war-chief — head of a government whose principal politics was to massacre, enslave, and rob the neighbor tribes — is to-day the venerable Mount of Pity, one of the most beneficent charities in any land. In front, among stores rich in every product of modern commerce, is the hall of a city government which has for centuries cared for the needy, restrained the rich, and spent vast sums in municipal improve ments for health, security, comfort, and even aesthetic training. To the right is the palace, occupied for cen turies by a central government which at its worst was far more merciful, more intelligent, and more progres sive than any tribal organization ever knew. Within revolver-shot are the cradles of printing, education, art, and organized charity in the New World ; for all these things came a century and a half to two centuries and a half earlier in Mexico than in the United States. Bishop Zumarraga set up here, in 1536, the first print ing-press in the Western Hemisphere; one did not reach the English colonies till 1638. In 1584 this same pioneer press printed the first music in America. The first New World attempt at a newspaper was the Mercilrio Volante (Flying Mer cury), Mexico, 1693 — about a dozen years ahead of our colonies.* Here are the first American schools, colleges, mu seums, hospitals, asylums — even schools and training- * And antedating the Didrio Erudito of Peru, and its suc cessor, the Merairio Peruano, by about a century. HUITZILOPOCHTLI THE HEART OF THE NATION 5 1 schools for Indians ; * even hospitals for Indians and negroes. In the year 1803, by-the-way, the hospitals of the City of Mexico had already an aggregate of 1 100 beds. It is entirely safe to say that no other city in the world with the population (then about 140,000) could match this. Certainly no city of ours approaches that proportion to-day. On every side, where were the squat adobes of the Indian pueblo, is now an architecture we have nothing to parallel ; and only those who have never seen either could dream of comparing the brute bulk of Aztec architecture (wonderful as it was for man in the tribal relation) with the magnificent art which has succeeded it. Here is still, as Humboldt found it, "the city of palaces"; possibly even yet, as he declared it, "the handsomest capital in America." And instead of im molating its outside Indians upon porphyry altars, the new dispensation has (though not without friction and blunders) saved and educated them to be citizens all, and among them important scholars, great engineers, and sometime presidents of a republic. To grasp just how much this means of contrast between the methods of the noble Saxon and the brutal Spaniard, we need only fancy ourselves electing Tecumseh or Red Cloud or Osceola to be President of the United States. We might also hunt up the churches that we have built for our aborigines while Mexico was building thou sands. And we might even ponder upon the 250,000 * The first Indian school was founded in 1524 by the Belgian fraile, Pedro de Gante (said to have been a natural son of Charles V.). It stood where the Academy of Fine Arts now is. The industrial schools for Indians date back to 1543, 52 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Indians left of our millions,* while it is a proved fact that the Indian population not only of Mexico, but of Spanish America by-and-large, is greater to-day than at the Conquest — and incomparably better off. This is little to say of what might be said, but it is enough for a small finger-post towards common-sense. That a great city has been able at all to persist for three hundred and seventy-seven years (on top of sev eral centuries as a pueblo of, at last, 20,000) in the bottom of a natural sink, undrained and unredeemed of its own past, is the tallest possible tribute to the climate of Mexico. The half such mockery of hy gienic laws would be impossible in any city of ours east of Denver. But altitude and aridity are miracle- workers, and Mexico has needed their best. She has had fearful epidemics in the far past, and sufficient insalubrity in the present. At last, however, the san itary corner is turned in so long a lane. The vast swamp which was the Valley of Mexico (for these shal low lagoons were not seriously " lakes ") is drained. So early as 1607 the agitation for an outlet came to a head, after a generation of discussion. There was by then, of course, no dream anywhere of sanitary sewerage ; but relief was demanded from the storm- water floods from the mountain cordon which rims this fertile bowl. Some of these inundations were terribly serious; particularly those of 1553, 1580, 1604, 1607, and 1629. Under the Viceroy Don Luis Velas- co, 2, and on the plans of the eminent engineer En- * And the great majority of those are in the territory con trolled by Spain till within half a century. THE FIRST PRINTING-OFFICE IN THE NEW WORLD (1536) THE HEART OF THE NATION 53 rique Martinez, Royal Cosmographer, the herculean tajo of Nochistongo* was riven through the northern hills to drain the valley into a branch of the Rio Pa- nuco. This cut (traversed to-day by the tourist in his Pullman) is a dozen miles long, with an average depth of about one hundred and eighty feet, and an average width of about three hundred. It cost great mortali ty and six millions, and was a rather fair contract to be let in America two hundred and ninety years ago — the very year, indeed, in which the first English col ony camped on the fringe of the New World. * Work on this enterprise began November 28, 1607. The Viceroy himself (Marques de Salinas) struck the first blow of the pickaxe; 15,000 Indians were employed in the work ; and September 17, 1608, the first waters ran through the great tun nel. In December the Viceroy and the Archbishop inspected the work ; and the former rode horseback more than a mile into the tunnel, which was fifteen feet wide and thirteen high. It caved so seriously that Martinez arched it with brick ma sonry. In 1629 a greenhorn Viceroy ordered the tunnel closed, to see if Mexico really could be flooded. His curiosity was satisfied when the water stood a yard deep in the streets ; and he promptly imprisoned Martinez ! The capital remained thus inundated for five years, and street travel was by boats. For the second time the Spanish crown ordered the city removed to the mainland, near Tacubaya ; but as the property valuation was already over forty million dollars, the cddula was revoked. After this great flood, the tunnel of Nochistongo was gradual ly converted into an open cut — the largest ever made by the hand of man. The whole vacillating tale lasted till 1789. There were engineers enough and good enough ; but even good Viceroys were not quite fitted for meddling. Already in 1598, by the way, the licenciado Obregon and maestro Arci- niega had proposed a drainage tunnel under the ridge between Sincoque and Nochistongo. 54 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION This vast work, however, did not cut deep enough to serve the valley. Various minor attempts were made — in 1612 we find Felipe III. laying a tax of a cuartillo (three cents) on every pint of wine sold in the capital, the proceeds to go to the drainage, and there were many other imposts, but nothing effective resulted in two centuries and a half. With the accession of Diaz to the presidency, twenty years ago, the imminent necessity of an outlet found recognition, and work was again begun — though lack of funds kept it limping for a decade. Since 1886, however, it has had its Junta Directiva and its fixed revenues, and has gone steadily forward. Mexican engineers were divided as to whether it would be bet ter to utilize the tremendous gash of Nochistongo or begin de nuevo in an opposite direction ; and the lat ter opinion won. As I write, the greatest drainage canal in the world is finished. Mexico will never again be flooded ; and in a short time it will have the more intimate daily advantages that an outlet means. Next to President Diaz, this magnificent work is owed to the skill and faith of another significant type of modern Mexico. Luis Espinosa, engineer of the Desague, is a Guanajuatan of the humblest birth, largely Indian by blood, and of few early advantages. But when he assumed the work (in 1879) tne canal found its master. Through years of discouragement — wherein he sometimes lacked not only money for his army of laborers, but food for his family — the mute, brown engineer held his way like the man he is ; and the end has crowned his work. The Desague is forty-seven kilometres five hundred PRESIDENT DIAZ AND HIS PARTY INSPECTING THE DESAGUE MOUTH OF THE TUNNEL OF ZUMPANGO THE HEART OF THE NATION 55 and eighty metres long. It begins on the east side of the city, six metres wide, and a little over five metres below the level of the Plaza. These dimensions grow steadily, until at the mouth of the great tunnel of Zumpango, which bores the last hill to the ravine of Tequizquiac, it is one hundred and ninety -five feet wide, and nearly seventy-five feet deep. The tunnel is eleven kilometres long, an oval a little over thir teen feet in its greater diameter, and, being in par ticularly treacherous soil, is heavily masonried throughout. Its air-shafts are thirteen hundred feet apart, and the deepest is four hundred feet. The gra dient is one in one thousand, which gives a current of seven feet a second. The fall of the rest of the canal is one foot to the mile. The whole work cost eigh teen millions, and has been completed without fatal ities. Like every other inejora of his capital and nation, the Desague has not only the master's moral support, but his eye. Diaz inspects the work frequently ; and, as I have seen, his inspections are nowise perfunctory. He is first at every point — few of the visiting party have half his legs at half his years, and none his com prehensive eye. This outlet canal done, the next step is modern saneamiento for the capital. Mexico is to have at once the most perfect sewerage system on the conti nent, if not in the world. The plans are drawn by the competent municipal engineer Roberto Gayol, the money is ready, and the mains are being built. In a few months, also, the city will own the most complete modern hospital in America — ending as well as she began. 56 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Cortez the conqueror has no monument in the in gratitude of republics — partly because so soon as in ninety years we can hardly be expected to forgive the mother-nation from whom we have revolted, and part ly because of the present funnily serious disposition to deify the original aborigine* whom Cortez conquered and bettered ; no monument, that is, except the hos pital he founded — and incidentally Mexico. On the street of Ixtapalapa by whose causeway he first en tered town (November 8, 15 19) he built in 1527 the Hospital of the Clean Conception of Jesus,f endowing it with an hacienda in Cuernavaca. For three hun dred and seventy years it has been doing its work of mercy; and to-day its appointments are up to date, * Or so much of him as dwelt in the pueblo of Tenochtitlan. Oddly enough, the new theogony includes no heroes from Tlas- cala, or Chalco, or Orizaba, or Totonaco, or from any other Mexican tribes which lived by their own industry, and not by enslaving their neighbors. They welcomed the Spaniards who delivered them from the Aztec yoke. \ The inscription upon the outer wall reads (translated) : Hospital OF The Clean Conception of Mary Most Holy And Jesus the Nazarene. The most ancient of the nation. Founded In this location, famous in the Gentile days under the name of Huitzillan, About the Year 1527. Renewed and repaired in that of 1838. THE BEST-AUTHENTICATED PORTRAIT OF CORTEZ (Presented by the Conqueror to the Hospital de Jesus) THE HEART OF THE NATION 57 with accommodation and lovely environment for sev enty-five patients of both sexes. It is still controlled by the descendants of Cortez, and contains the two paintings upon which we depend for our portraits of him. The kneeling figure, in the sala, was painted in Spain for him, and sent by himself to this hospital.* The standing figure, in the little chapel, being inferior in art and authenticity, is naturally the one most copied. One cannot even list here the philanthropic institu tions of the capital, much less describe them. But it is proper to point, in passing, at once their oldness and their newness — the Spanish of them and their modern Mexicanism. No other nation has founded so extensively such beneficences in its colonies, and few colonies have built so well upon their inheritance. It is a useful Delsartean attitude for the mind to try to "fahncy" England peppering New England with schools, hospitals, asylums, and churches for Indians. But that is what infamous Spain did, three hundred years ago, up and down a space which measures some thing over one hundred and three New Englands. We may pick flaws in these institutions as administered * The inscription in one corner of this painting reads, when Englished : The Most Excellent Sir Don Fer nando Cortez, Mar ques del Valle, Chief Justice, Governor and Captain-General that was of this New Spain, and its first Conqueror, Patron and Found er of this illustrious Hospital. 58 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION while we were hanging witches, but the institutions were there — and are there yet. The Royal Hospital of Mexico (for Indians) was founded in 1553. It covered three and a half acres — good elbow-room for its normal two hundred and twenty patients. In the great epidemic of 1762, by crowding, it cared for eight thousand three hundred and sixty-one ; and it is still operative. This is but a beginning in the list. The hospital of San Andres was founded in 1626. The Hospital Juarez occupies a college founded in 1575. The Beneficencia Publica alone has charge of ten institutions in the city, on which it expends $25,000 a month — like the Industrial School, the School of Correction (also industrial), the Asylum of the Poor (whose plain exterior hides a truly beautiful home for the nine hundred inmates, mostly children, who are educated and given useful trades in an atmosphere of flowers and music ; it was founded in 1765, and was really a training school for Indian children); a hospital for the wounded; a ma ternity hospital (founded by Carlota in 1865); a school for the blind ; an insane asylum for men, another for women — and so on. It feeds three thousand four hundred people, and supervises the public sale of drink and food. There are also many and excellent private institutions of charity, supported by the con tributions of the wealthy. When the great new hos pital — on the French detached plan, with thirty-five buildings fifty feet apart, at a cost of $800,000 — is completed, the present hospitals, all of which are very valuable properties, will be sold. VI NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES And here a word may be spoken in season of the beggars who so dent the sensibilities of the average tourist. One reason why mosquitoes seem so numer ous is that we cannot get away from them. So with the Mexican beggar. Wherever you go you see all there is of him; and meeting fifty people of whom two are beggars, you naturally conclude that the same proportion holds good throughout the whole popula tion. But this is a generic blunder. As a matter of fact, long field study in both lines leads to a convic tion that there are probably not so many professional beggars per cent, in Mexico as tramps in the United States. But the tramp is never concentric, and only the curious student, the railroad man on a transconti nental line, and the police authority dream how enor mous is our army of mendicants. The Mexican por- diosero* too, has a different stock in trade. His capital is to look as poor, diseased, and repulsive as he possibly can — maybe with a vague intuition that the pneumogastric nerve has a large voice in the congress of the emotions. He has not learned the broader plat form of insolence, bulldozing, and alternative crime. * " For-God's-sake-er," literally. 60 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION He clings to the traditions of his craft — for it is a pro fession, and inclined to be a gentle one. He whines, it is true — because he is of a people to whom a whine sounds pitiful, and not contemptible — but his appeal is as perfect in its fine rhetoric as in its humility. And when you have bestowed the cop per tlaco, which is all that he expects, he says (sin cerely and without a dream of irony), " God give more to you !" Mexico has as many poor as any other city of 350,000 I know — and more than any in the United States — but it must be borne in mind that the vast majority of them are laborers, and only the petty minority beggars. As for actual suffering, there is far less than in any of our urban popula tions. Even the beggar's coppers are plenty to pro vide him with the indispensables of life in a motherly climate. From beggars to churches is but a step — at least in physics, since the church door is a favorite stalking- ground for these shrewd reckoners of the emotions. The temples of the capital are by class the most inev itable buildings in it — not only for the old heroism they represent, nor solely for their architectural beauty, great as it is. The Samson of a cathedral is shorn of its locks. The third course of its towers (two hundred and eight feet high, as they stand) was forbidden by royal edict to be erected, for fear of the effect of so vast a weight upon the treacherous soil of the ex- swamp. It is a pity, for this is the only outer fault of a magnificent pile ; and since it stands on the rock islet of the teocalli, the due proportions of the towers might have been carried out without probable danger of the sinking which has so tilted the beautiful Profesa, NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES 6 1 Tolsa's classic Loreto, and many of the older other buildings.* The Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan schools of church architecture have here their most perfect con vention (though not in every case the greatest known delegate) ; and there is, besides, the striking type pe culiar to this city, the style Churrigueresque, named for a native architect of the seventeenth century, whose finest monuments are the Sagrario (elbowing the ca thedral) and La Santisima. Their fachadas, and the patio of the ex-convent of San Agustin (now the post- office of Queretaro), present the most remarkable stone-carving in North American architecture. That is no small thing to say when one remembers the thousands of churches in Mexico, of which hardly one lacks some noble characteristic. Content is a happy trait, but I doubt if such content is happy as is past being startled by the comparison of our religious edi fices with those of a disprized land and faith. It is curious to speculate whence came the pentecost of skill and daring which not only made every church a monument, but in so many seems to have delighted in braving the constructional traditions. The flat arches, the flying arches, the arches with space in stead of masonry to receive their " lateral thrust," the pendent staircases, the omitted pillars, the keyless domes — there are a thousand venturesomenesses, yet not one lapse from security. And to these days some * The cathedral was founded by Cortez in honor of Nuestra Seiiora de la Asuncion, but the original church was razed be fore 1600 to make room for the present edifice, which is 393 by 192 feet, with a height of 184 feet from the floor to key of dome. 62 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION architects in Mexico pluck gravitation by the beard in a fashion that is not familiar to me outside of Latin America. For example, Ajea's staircase in the palace, and Jesus Palma's series of arches in the Ho tel Humboldt — thirty feet span and nine inches spring. The caracoles, or snail-shell stone staircases, are al ways fascinating; and they are in nearly every tower. That in the prison of Hidalgo, in Chihuahua, is the common type; but the cathedral of Mexico has a wonderful caracol without a core. The ninety-two chiluca steps, instead of concentring to form a pillar, form a central hole, and down that superb spiral one can peer from top to bottom. But, as I was to say, religion nor architecture nor historic association is the only attraction to these venerable piles. To do much of anything of impor tance in the modern city, one must go to church. The Reforma was a movement in whose swift thor oughness public necessity took no heavier hand than private greed. Diverted from the church, the edifices were looted of their plate, their silver altar-rails, and their Murillos — one gentleman, since happily dead, got $60,000 at a pawnshop for the paintings he had collected by this simple process. The buildings them selves were promptly " denounced,"* and sold for beggarly sums — many of them for beggarly ends. You cannot sample far among the hotels without lodging in an ex-convent. You may have your livery turnout from another. If you visit school, or barracks or hospital, it will generally be in another. And if you chance to go to prison, you would be (up to just * The Spanish miner's term for filing on a "claim." THE GREAT CARACOL STAIRCASE, CATHEDRAL OF MEXICO [Looking down from top\ NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES 63 now) locked inside of church walls. Of course it all results in far more costly and artistic school-houses, hospitals, and prisons than are fashionable in lands which have not had the lucky opportunity to get ahead of their Maker. But her attitude in pcenology to-day is very signif icant of modern Mexico. Mexican prisons, in my ob servation, have as a rule richly deserved all their in mates, whether native or imported. Particularly Americans — since no other people have quite the same out- of- school feeling when away from home, and no others so habitually violate not only the new laws but their own congenital traditions. I would certainly not say no American was ever unjustly im prisoned in Mexico. I simply have never known one to be. These prisons also deserve some of their ill repute as a mode of luxury. Until people can build prisons for prisons, they must use what makeshifts they may; and superb architecture does not reconcile the prisoner to the natural shortcomings of a jail which was built for a church. Belem, the great gen eral lock-up, is the old convent of that name, and was not at all adequate for its more than three thousand in mates — though I have seen worse arrangements in many American cities. Santiago de Tlaltelolco, the mil itary prison, is as superannuated. It is one of the oldest churches in Mexico, having been founded by the first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, and its convent was one of the first schools — in which the historian, Bernardino Ribeira (commonly known as Sahagun), was a profes sor. It was a school for the sons of Indian caciques.* * Here the famous myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe was 64 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION But the day of the makeshift is passing. Just be fore I left the capital the retiring governor* of the federal district turned over to the federal government the new penitentiary, a model modern institution on the Croffton plan, which, I believe, has not yet its equal anywhere among us. It cost over two millions, is of basalt and tezontli, covers eighteen acres, and is perfect in every detail of sanitation, security, and comfort.f Before these lines are published it will be occupied, and the days of Tlaltelolco and Belem will be done. There is similar activity all over the repub lic in replacing the old ad interim convent-jails with institutions up to date. The state penitentiary at Puebla, for instance, is a type of what is being done by cities we would account small, and states that seem to us but sparsely settled. There is no hanging in Mexico, and (outside what concerns the army and the brigands) no capital punishment. Nor are irons allowed under the new dispensation. I have known the holy horror of officers of ours at not being al lowed to manacle prisoners they were extraditing. The modern Mexican theory is that irons are an igno miny, and that it is the officer's business to keep his born. It sprang from a comedy written by Antonio Valeriano, for the representation of which the Indian Marcos painted upon a blanket what is now the " miraculous image." The episode is a magnificent type of the origin and spread of primi tive hero-myths. * An honorable type of the administrators of modern Mexi co, Don Pedro Rincon Gallardo. f The director in his office, by a turn of the wrist, unlocks or locks every cell. There is a department for women and one for juvenile offenders. ! A PATIO IX THE PRISON OF BELEM NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES 65 man. It may surprise the average reader to learn that the object of prisons in Mexico is not so much pun ishment as reform by education. To such, the mod ern laws of Diaz regulating penitentiaries should be instructive reading. In these laws, of course, the credit system for good behavior cuts as certain a fig ure as the compulsory education and the learning of trades in the finely appointed shops.* Except the artillery and the engineers, whatever regiment you visit is quartered in an old convent. Of these barracks the most interesting is the Merced, founded in 1601, with a patio which is one of the finest in the city. Many schools are similar debtors to the unthanked past ; and in their case, at least, one may be most willing to pardon the usurpation. The capital has, by-thc-way, fifty public schools for boys, forty-nine for girls, six mixed, and nine night schools. There is also a large number of private institutions, from the kindergarten up, and of special schools, train ing schools, and the like. It is also to be noted, amid the educational progress, that on September 16, 1896, the metric system became compulsory throughout the republic, and that Mexicans arc tolerantly sorry for * A prisoner's term is divided into three periods. The first is occupied with penal labor. The second is at labor in the training school, with a little pay. The third, " Preparatory freedom," includes paid work and many privileges. The pri mary education is strictly compulsory. A jail-bird unable to read and write will never again be graduated. In the third period the convicts are taught drawing, mechanics, and indus trial chemistry. The trades include stone-working, iron-mould ing, saddle -making, weaving, carpentry, tailoring, printing, blacksmithing, shoe making, etc. ; and, for the disabled, broom and basket making and the like. 5 66 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION such nations as still cling to the superstition of a cruder scheme. The edifice of the first university in America (found ed by the Spanish crown in 155 1) is to-day occupied by the National Conservatory of Music — an invention of poor Carlota. The National Academy of Art (an cient Academy of San Carlos) stands where Fray Pedro de Gante founded, in 1524, the first school in the New World — a school for Indians. The Normal School for males, with its forty-five instructors, six hundred pupils, and first-class German equipment, including ex cellent machine-shops, occupies the old convent of Santa Teresa (1678). The Normal School for females has fourteen hundred* pupils, and is in a hundred- thousand-dollar building of 1648. The fine old Jesuit college of San Ildefonso, erected in 1749 at a cost of $400,000, is now filled with the thousand pupils of the National Preparatory School. The National College of Medicine is housed in the old home of the Inquisi tion (1732) — the chaloj- edifice, whose four hanging arches at each corner of the lower corridor are famous. The building was taken for its present purpose in this century, the Holy Office dying in America with the Independence, but the medical college was established by royal decree of 1768. It has now several hundreds of pupils. San Lorenzo (1598) is now the manual- training school, where poor boys are gratuitously * In both these schools the figures include the primary de partments. Pupils are educated from A B C up to a teacher's diploma. The primary course is six years, and may be entered at from seven to twelve years of age. The normal course is five years. t Flat-nosed. THE BARRACKS OF LA MERCED NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES 6j taught lithography, engraving, printing, carpentry, and many other trades. The similar institution for girls is of course modern, dating only from 1874. The Law School occupies the old ex-convent of the Incarnation. but itself dates only from 1868. The School of Agri culture and the School of Commerce are also modern. The National Library, with its 200,000 volumes, dwells in the splendid sequestered church of San Agustin, given it by Maximilian in 1864. The National Mu seum — just now not in wholly ideal hands — occupies part of the million-dollar building erected in 1731 for the royal mint. And so on through a list that would rival the catalogue of the ships. The School of Mines and Engineering, however, stands in no dead man's shoes. Its magnificent building of chiluca (the nearest to granite the valley affords) was built for it by the great Tolsa in 1793, and cost three millions.* As late as 1824 Humboldt declared, " No city of the New Con tinent, not excepting those of the United States, pre sents scientific establishments so great and solid as those of the capital of Mexico. "f Except as to the buildings, of course, so much could not be said to-day. We have forged ahead (though only in this generation) by our vast superiority in numbers and wealth. But it is as true now as it was in 1824 that the educational insti tutions of Mexico can be ignored only by the ignorant. The gravest fault in the present capital is natural enough to its transitional state — the vertigo of sudden * This is, so to speak, a mining school of technology. It has a school of applied mining at Pachuca. t Before this century began, Spain had spent $400,000 on three botanical commissions which had explored the flora of Peru, New Granada, and New Spain (Mexico). 68 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION progress — but it is an unworthiness I pray educated Mexico may see in time. As with us, the wine of material development begins to mount to the head, and in their splendid reaching out for the new they too much forget the old. No modern structure in the capital compares in dignity and worth of architecture with any one of hundreds of buildings which date from the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, and few will last so long as they will still.* Too many wealthy dons are erecting residences copied after — and as ugly and uncomfortable as — the American parvenu's. A needless vandalism has already dynamited a hundred arches of the massy old aqueductf of Chapultepec, * The Casa del Conde de Santiago, on the street of Jesus Nazareno, is one of the finest types, with its splendid, carved doors to the zaguan, its seventeen eave-spouts of great field- pieces, each carved from a single stone, and the fierce serpent's head (spoil of a prehistoric teocalli) set in its southwest corner. Wells, Fargo & Co.'s express occupies another ancient palace ; and the Jockey Club has a gem— the Casa de Azulejos, with its fine covering of encaustic tiles, and its romantic story, which has given rise to a proverb. t Begun about 1604. Cost $150,000. The inscription on the fountain on this aqueduct reads, in the quaint semi-shorthand of the day : Rey£2 en las Es panas la Cath* MagB de S5 D2 Fer NANDO EL VI (Q™ DlOS GS5) Y EN SU Nom* La Nueva Esp™ el Exc^E SS M ARQUEZ DE LAS AMARILLAS SE FA BR1CO ESTA PILA. (Reigning in the Spains, His Catholic Majesty Ferdinand WTloXAI. CONSERVAI DRV OF ML'slC (In the building of the first American university) NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES 69 which would be a treasure to any city ; and its older brother of Santa Fe is as wantonly breached. There was even a movement to erase the noble fountain of the Salto de Agua (apparently for no other reason than that it dates from 1779, and is worth all the modern fountains in the city put together), and to use its room for a few yards of pavement. But, happily, this iniquity was forestalled. I cannot believe a tem per so open to sentiment as is the Latin-American will much longer countenance these vandalisms ; and if that were conceivable, the new commercial sense cannot remain blind to the fact that these superb old landmarks are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Mexico. All the march of modern progress need not trample a single one of these monu ments. Even the squat, unpretentious National Palace* has suffered seriously within. It is well that public offices be habitable, but they can be made so without philistinism ; and Hon. Ignacio Mariscal (sometime Minister to Washington, now Vice-President of the republic and Minister of Foreign Relations) deserves gratitude for having conserved the magnificent old ceilings of Spanish cedar which are the charm of the Hall of Ambassadors and of his department, while the VI., and, in his name, over New Spain, the Most Excellent Marques de las Amarillas, this fountain was built.) A similar tablet on the other side of the pila bears the inscription of the corregidor, etc. * Fifty feet high and 600 feet square. The original building was burned in a famine-riot by the Indians in 1692, and the Viceroy, Don Gaspar de Sandoval, had to take refuge in the convent of San Francisco. 70 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION inutile "utilitarian" has plastered most of the rest of the Paldcio. From the halls which overlook from the south the patio de honor, Mexico has been guided, well or ill, these three centuries and a half. Here the viceroys interpreted the royal c/dulas and made bandos of their own — like that which in 1554 forbade all jewel lers, because his Excellency saw that luxury grew too fat.* Here Iturbide and Maximilian (the only em perors Mexico ever had) held their little circumstance before the tragic end. Here Juarez, the only man under the republic (up to within twenty years) able to keep his footing in power for six years, did his preg nant work — at least, while he was not dodging the French armies. And here the only Mexican Presi dent who has surpassed him has made his incompar ably greater conquest for the father-land. * For us, to whom paternal government seems " funny," there would be great humor in a digest of the bandos of Spanish America. A Viceroy of Peru, for instance (the Duque de Palata, about 1680), made one against the eating of cucumbers by Indians — these vegetables being then locally called " mata- serranos " (Indian-killers). A predecessor by about sixty years, the Viceroy Marques de Guadalcazar, had by bando prohibited the wearing of the manto by the ladies of Lima, on the ground that it was too provocative. It gave to see the eyes, the tip of the nose, and about six square inches of arm. The short bell skirt, which revealed the most beautiful feet and ankles known to man, was deemed harmless. It is almost needless to say that the ladies were "better men "than the old Viceroy, and that the manto survived until ridiculous and unbecoming for eign fashions killed it. No viceregal edict, by-the-way, sur passed the royal cSdula of Philip II., ordering all the bachelors of Lima to marry within thirty days. VII CHEAP MONEY IT was well for Mexico that when silver took its Gadarene course Diaz was in the saddle. There is no uncertainty in saying that no other man of her whole history — unless it were that great first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza — could have lifted her safely across the gulf. Here was a silver country, not by fanatic experi ment, but by geologic predestination. Practically she never produced gold, and the unparalleled coinage of her mints in all these centuries* has been in an enor mous majority white. She is producing still \ seventy- five millions of silver a year, and about six millions gold. To her, enter sudden bankruptcy, shrivelling her dollar crop by one-half its value. She was already committed to progress, and that meant a foreign debt — payable in gold. Here were the elements of as pretty a collapse as one could ask to see. But Mexico was already knit, and the compound unit was handled by no uncertain fist. There was a government which knew, first, what it wished ; second ly, how to get it — and when there is a policy adopted * From 1527 to June 1, 1895, $3,585,980,462. t Fiscal year 1894-5. 72 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION in Mexico nowadays it "goes," in the language of politics. Even Juarez had fallen under temptation. The repudiation fathered by him was a chief cause of inter vention and Maximilian. But Diaz had the clearer head. His first step was to secure the credit of his nation. He simply said, " The debt shall be met in gold," and set himself to the pleasant task of finding two dollars for one. Revenue can be raised in Mexico ; and at the side of Diaz was unquestionably one of the ablest finan ciers of modern times — Jose Ives Limantour, present Minister of Hacienda — and behind them they had the Mexican people. It is perhaps only in the formative stage of a nation that a government appeal to patriot ism is stronger than selfish luxury or business greed. When it came to paying two prices for imports, Mexico began to get along with very few imports indeed. She learned in that sharp pinch the great lesson — ignoring of which has been the ruin of Peru, the only other Spanish colony which was ever richer — that it is cheaper to make than to buy. Exchange acted as a rabid protective tariff, and the country which practi cally knew nothing but mines began suddenly to manufacture.* Three years ago the import duties on cotton cloths brought the government five millions a year ; to-day they bring nothing, for there is no longer importation. But the cotton-mills which have sprung up in the republic already paid $1,200,000 in taxes last year, an amount which this year will very greatly * On a commercial scale, that is. There have always been fireside manufactures in Mexico and a few big privileges. i«BSHKK;iJ Mi \..WA w | DOOR OF THK "CVSV 11KL I'OXI'K, MKX1CO CHEAP MONEY "]l increase. Beer yielded in the custom-houses. a million a year, and to-day yields not one-thousandth part as much ; for Mexico is now dotted with breweries of her own. These startling figures are typical of the new national attitude, and at the same time of the new national unity — a country " making it unanimous" with the brains of one man. It is not to be forgotten, however, that some of the most potent enablers of Mexico in the struggle with depreciation have been fortuities which neither Diaz nor Limantour invented, though they have known how to profit thereby. The nation has had an un conscious angel — a benefactor by no grace of his. Uncle Sam pays for her products in sound money — that is, at double rates. For it must be remembered that a Mexican dollar in Mexico buys as much (of everything but imported goods), now that it is worth forty-six or seven cents gold, as it did when it was worth ioo. This fact somewhat explains the epidemic of new industries. The gold-country manufacturer re moving to Mexico about doubles his capital by the mere act of crossing the border. For his every five- dollar gold -piece he gets something like $10. He more than trebles it again on his pay-roll — a matter not more significant to him than it should be to such working-men as would adopt the Mexican finances without the Mexican remedies. And beyond these two glittering premiums the manufacturer is given substantial concessions — for Diaz believes in factories, and means to have them by wholesale. Furthermore, now that the interstate tariffs are removed, the manu facturer will no longer need to crowd to the centres of population, but can go to the cheap water-powers. 74 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION To those who produce, the Mexican dollar is " a sweet boon." It is the unit of the country. It is worth outside only half what it used to be — but they do not send it so much outside. At home it is as good as ever, and they get two of it where they once got one, since nominal prices are not much changed. The exporter of coffee pays $35 for the cargo that used to be worth $30; and he sells it not at $40, but at $30. But his $35 is paid by him in Mexican silver, and his $30 is received by him in gold, which means to him about twice as much. The prudent New England saw, " Money does not grow on every bush," was invented without knowl edge of Mexico. For here it does. Here at last (for the traveller, at least) is the dreamland, the kingdom of Something for Nothing. Bargains in Dollars ! Coin selling out at half cost! Help yourself to what you wish, and the cashier will give you your money back, and a few dollars to boot ! One may half fancy what our advertisers would do with such a text. You drop into the estanquillo on the corner, and buy twenty -five honorable cigars for seventy -five cents. The tobacconist rings your five-dollar gold- piece on the counter (I notice that it is not the Su perior Race which manages to pass plugged money in Mexico), and without emotion hands you nine sil ver dollars and some small change. There are new Americans and Americans. Some escape before he shall discover his mistake. Others (and the immoral truth must be confessed that they are of as furtive mien when they do emerge) tarry to set him right. But the Spanish American is wonderfully poised. I never knew him to laugh in the face even of a tourist. L_ THE NATIONAL PALACE CHEAP MONEY 75 With some other little furniture he should be the model kindergartner. No, he has not erred. It4 is el cdmbio. There is contagion in this. You penetrate the next stand and buy a box of twenty-five Escepcionales (which a quar ter apiece could not procure in New York) at $2 ; and from your half-eagle you gather up of that which is left eight dollars y pico. It is like the miracle of the loaves and fishes brought down to date and American ideals. The philosopher's stone was mere mud to this. To make a salary simply by spending money — that is precisely what we are looking for. There is only one hard fact. Ten cents out of an American silver dollar leaves only ninety cents. But that is trivial. All one has to do is to bring plenty of gold, and swap one dollar for two as long as one can stand prosperity. The last large factor among those that have saved Mexico in the jaws of cheap money is — cheap labor. The average Mexican workman gets about three bits (thirty-seven and a half cents) a day. On the hacien das it is often less; in the factories and on the railroads it is generally more.* No wonder the manufacturer and the grower can stand it ! * Mechanics (native) get $2 to $3 a day ; Americans, $4 to $5.75. Section-hands are paid about 60 cents. If the wages of mechanics seem low, it is easily explained. They are not, in our sense, mechanics, but " helpers " and " handy-men." They are recruited from the lowest class ; for up the social stairs the old idea that to be a gentleman one must do nothing, and do it well, is prevalent as it was in our chivalric South — and as it is not unknown in a more modern society. But even out of this peon clay the hand of evolution is modelling better and ever better wares. For it is plastic. No peasantry anywhere 76 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION It is fair to add that the current pity for the Mexi can laborer is altogether wasted. He has a climate decent to be lived in — wherein, it is estimated, twelve days' work in the year is enough to supply one peon with the necessities of life. His small wages are not only as much as he wants, but as much as he wishes. If he gets higher pay he works fewer days — for to his unbitten notion the only object of work is to get enough to live on. Of course the final outlook for Mexico is when this multiple of narrow, ragged, igno rant content shall begin to increase his wants ; but it is a long way before that bridge needs to be crossed. When he begins to require larger wages for larger horizons, he will begin to get them — and already the first tokens of the change appear ; for wages are very slowly improving in Mexico. Meantime the Mexican laborer earns enough to make him the farthest from populism and strikes of any toiler in North America,* is likelier raw material for the making of skilled artisans. None have apter eyes or hands, and few have such patience for de tail. Even Humboldt was astonished by this mechanic gift, and prophesied of it great things — which are fast coming true. It takes time, anywhere, to develop workmen whose brains shall outrun their fingers ; but the ideal combination of dexter ity, elasticity to circumstance, and forethought will be reached sooner here than in some other places. I recall no Northern land whose folk-handiwork is quite so widely and so truly "art work." And in Mexico it is fully as easy for the humblest to rise to the very top as it is in our republic — in politics, eco nomics, or scholarship. There no man fails to be great because he is a Negro or an Indian. * Mexico has no hint whatever of our antagonism between the Have-nots and the Haves. Far more inbred to aristocracy than the Saxon, the Spaniard has yet kept far more of the ^^B^* THE 5 V. ]\"> DK ASVA. MFX1C0 ^I"-J CHEAP MONEY yy and is at the same time enriching his employer and his nation. How far he is from suffering has often been shown. In 1894 there was a corn-famine. Hear ing the usual curb-stone gossip of destitution, the mu nicipal government of the capital arranged with the contractors of the Desague to employ at regular wages every man sent out. The city was placarded with no tices, and the quarter of San Lazaro buzzed with talk. Nascitur ridiculus mus. Three peons came to the mu- nicipalidad to see about it. And not one was pinched enough to go out to work ! By these tokens Mexico has met her greatest eco nomic crisis, and has prevailed. Under Juarez the revenues of the best year were below fourteen mill ions ; now they are above forty-six millions, and there is a surplus. Mexico also has at last the balance of trade in her favor. Her exports are growing at the rate of ten millions a year, her imports at the rate of four millions. A pretty penny in United States gold comes down annually to square the account ; for while Mexico sells us sixty-five per cent, of her ex ports, she gets only fifteen per cent, of her imports from us, preferring to do most of her buying from na tions that think it worth while to cultivate her trade. She is not only able to keep reducing her foreign gold debt (about $150,000,000) at two dollars for one, but has spare change to build two -million -dollar prisons and eighteen-million-dollar canals and twenty- million-dollar harbors. The enormous port improve ments at Tampico ($7,000,000), Coatzacoalcos ($7,000,- human attitude — since, after all, his aristocracy runs rather to the patriarchate than to the feudal tyranny. 78 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION 000), and Vera Cruz ($20,000,000) ; the railroad de velopment, in subsidizing which the Diaz administra tion has already expended $110,000,000 — these and their like activities indicate the financial condition of the government. And these are not sops to the Cerberus of selfish constituencies, but the logical paces of a consistent paternalism. I may add that the minor fall in silver which occurs as these pages go to press in book form, is not, in my opinion, of seri ous import to Mexico. Qui transtulit sustinet. The statesmanship which was competent to handle a de preciation of forty-eight per cent, in the currency of the country will not be baffled by a fall of eight per cent. It means some hardship, of course ; but I can not too much insist that Mexico as nowadays admin istered is fit to cope with any contingency inside of human probability. The new degradation of silver will (in Mexico) again shrink importation and increase manufacture. The next four years are to witness great things in perfecting internal communication. To me, one of the most important enterprises in Mexico is the " Cuernavaca " Railroad, now open from the capital to Tres Marias. It was contracted to be finished to the river Mescala* by or before last November, and with in eight months later to reach Acapulco. Though de layed past this limit, it is pushing on as fast as possi ble. Then for the first time Mexico will be crossed by rail — a transcontinental iron-way from the adequate artificial harbors of the Gulf coast, through the capi- * Which the author of the Kosmos had to cross on a zangada, or raft of calabashes. CHEAP MONEY 79 tal, with its already competent north and south con nections, to the Pacific and that superb natural har bor, the second finest on the globe. The west coast of Mexico I count the right arm of the country ; but it has always been bound. Now the lashings are about to fall. The vast productiveness of Guerrero and Si naloa and Jalisco and Michuacan will be developed ; and more than that, the whole country will have, for the first time in history, its fair outlet to the com merce of the world. Other railroads are playing their part. The Mexi can Central (with a fifth of the total mileage of the republic) and the International bind Mexico to us. Both have multiplied their business by six or seven in a decade, and both have a still larger hope. The Cen tral has at Tampico what will probably be the chief harbor of the Gulf. The International at Durango is only one hundred and sixty miles from the Pacific harbor of Mazatlan, and has engineers seeking an out let by profitable grades. The Mexican Southern (General Grant's road), finished in 1893, has opened one of the largest, richest, and hitherto least accessi ble portions of the country. The Vera Cruz line — dean of Mexican railroads, opened in 1873 — is waken ing its way -side territory, and will do much more when its terminal port is completed. There is re markable activity in the diversified territory pierced by the Interoceanic Railroad, where cotton-mills and pulp-paper mills are springing up, and slow old sugar haciendas are suddenly putting in the most modern machinery, to the tune of $60,000 to $100,000 apiece. An important line, under contract, will pass down the west coast to the Guatemalan frontier, striking Tehuan- 80 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION tepee (with its short transisthmian line and its harbor of Salina Cruz) from the northwest, as the Southern Railroad is to strike it from the northeast. Construc tion is begun on the " Corralitos road " (Gould sys tem) from El Paso into the Sierra Madre, and with ultimate destination on the lower Gulf of California. Down on the coast of Sinaloa is the splendid natural harbor of Topolobampo ; and if a railroad does not reach that port reasonably soon, I have authority for saying that it will be through no fault of Diaz. In deed, among his specific dreams for the general up lift of his nation one of the dearest is to thwart that astounding geography — so well defined by Humboldt — which splits Mexico in twain from top to bottom. Nothing could be more striking than this present state of transit in old New Spain. No other country in the world's history ever did anything like such a business by the backful. Until the railroads, Mexico was the paradise of the "packer." From prehistoric days down, the human back was the corner-stone of commerce ; and it did not disappear from the edifice even when the Conquest introduced beasts of burden. Even the interior trade with Durango, Chihuahua, and New Mexico occupied 60,000 pack-mules. From Vera Cruz to the capital, over wonderful and costly roads (which ate up, nevertheless, 70,000 mules a year), more than $20,000,000 worth of goods a year was " packed." Indeed, everything of the enormous imported luxury of New Spain came by the same painful process. Even the cacao of Guayaquil and the copper of Coquimbo were shipped up to Acapulco, and thence crossed the mountains by muleback clear to Vera Cruz — at $2 a carga of 81 pounds. As for human loads — and the CHEAP MONEY 8 I Indians still carry their own burdens mostly, instead of employing quadrupeds — the individual achievement is almost as startling as the aggregate. Humboldt found the tenateros in the mines he visited " carrying for six hours a weight ranging from 225 to 350 pounds on their backs, in a very high temperature, ascending eight or ten times, without rest, ladders of 1800 rounds." He very justly observes that this might properly change the notion that the tropics are ener vating. To this day it is a common thing to see a Mexican Indian carrying a back-load of 150 pounds twenty miles to market. There are many other railroads past the guesswork stage — the administration is sharply discouraging the "paper" lines of penniless promoters — but those above are the most pregnant with meaning for Mexico. As for telegraph lines, the first in the republic (that from the capital to Vera Cruz) was inaugurated in 1852; now there are over twelve thousand kilometres. The business thermometer in the capital is at least blood-warm, and is steadily mounting. During my permane'ncia there the street-car system* was sold for eight million dollars to a South African syndicate. The lines are to be made electric — the only anachron ism that lags. The city has 600 electric arc lamps, and 5000 incandescent. There are 1500 police, with 68 officers. The Ayuntamiento (city council) had placards up announcing six months' immunity from taxation for whatever householder should paint or im prove his building-front. The Banco de Ldndres (in the same period) desired to increase its capital from * With 241 miles of track, 3000 mules, and 2000 employes. 6 82 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION five millions to ten. In a few days the business men of the city subscribed not five millions, but twenty. They who know it best are not timorous as to the future of the capital city. Building is active, new "colonies" are being plot ted, sold, and occupied, and, among the other exten sive municipal improvements, some of the oldest and finest streets are being widened — of course at enor mous expense. Mexico was first paved in 1604. Among other imminent improvements, a million-dol lar national capitol is to be built. There is an active and effective Superior Council of Public Health, to which is largely due the abstinence of so many citi zens from falling into the temptations of mortality in an undrained city. Since June 1, 1872, compulsory vaccination in the city has marked the arms of more people* than the total population. It is a curi ous fact that vaccination never has to be repeated here. Once " taken," it is good' for a lifetime. And "compulsory" in Mexico does not mean "may be" — as these very figures show. There is inevitable ex amination, and those found unsigned are promptly led away for the health officer's autograph. The like paternalism is evident in most of the sev- * Exactly, up to May 22, 1896, 362,763. Smallpox was un known in the New World before the Conquest, being distinc tively a product of civilization — though of robust appetite among the uncivilized when it is brought to them. It reached Mexico in 1520 by a negro slave of Narvaez and promptly ex punged half the population of the capital. Its greatest rav ages were in 1763 and 1779 (the latter epidemic causing 9000 deaths in the capital alone). Already, by 1797, nearly 60,000 people had been vaccinated there. CHEAP MONEY 83 en departments of the federal government. Naturally the Minister of War and Marine has his hands full with the finely appointed arsenals, the military college, the school-ship Zaragosa, and other belongings. Nor is there much leeway for fathering the public by the Ministry of Foreign Relations or that of Finance. But there is larger philanthropic scope in the other four. The " Interior " has charge of the organized charities, among other things. "Justice and Public Instruction " manages the schools, libraries, museums, etc., and invented the present compulsory education law. "Communications and Public Works" oversees the vastly improved mail-service,* the telegraphs, rail roads, light-houses, and several other branches. The Ministry of Encouragement (" Fomento ") is most pa ternal of all, dealing with colonization, agriculture, mining, statistics, patents.f scientific institutes and commissions, observatories, and many other matters fit to be forwarded. Land titles are nowhere more se cure. The mining laws of Mexico are confessedly better than ours. Colonization is no longer a mere dream. The half-score thriving Mormon colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora were the beginning ; and now three hundred thousand acres have been purchased in * There are fifty mail-carriers (with free delivery) in the cap ital. Nor is the postal system a parvenu here. Indeed, Span ish America was the first country in history to put the mails on a large footing, We thought our overland pony express, in the golden days of California, a big thing ; but half a century earlier there were regular monthly mails the length of Spanish America — from Paraguay to San Francisco, California, a little matter of 5S00 miles, t The term of a patent in Mexico is twenty years. 84 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Chiapas by a Japanese syndicate, which will settle thousands of its countrymen on these rich coffee, su gar, rubber, and tobacco lands. A geographic com mission under this ministry is doing at last definitive work on the cartography of the republic, while mete orology, patents, and the distribution of seeds and fish are assuming civilized proportions. Under this direc tion, too, the first census of the republic* was taken, October 20, 1895. It yielded a population of 12,570,- 195, but is undoubtedly short. Any one who has ever had seriously to do with Indians anywhere knows how impossible it is to enumerate them ; and the ab origine of Mexico is no exception to the rule. It is interesting to remember that there are twenty original American languages spoken in Mexico to this day, of which the Nahuatl (Aztec), Zapotec, Otomi, Mixtec, Huaxtec, Mija, Tarahumar, Tepehuan, Totonac, Cora, Cac-chiquel, Matlazinga, Tarasca, and Maya are chief, and have attained printed grammars and vocabularies. These are not dialects, but languages apart — as far as Greek from German. As we find constant confusion in the terms, it may be of interest also to give an authentic list of the sev en local castes which have been distinguished in Span ish America since the first generation after the Con quest. There is, by-the-way, an interesting (and not ill-done) series of Spanish oil-paintings on copper, il lustrating these and the finer subdivisions with color and text, from the sixteenth century: I. Gachupin, a native of Europe. * The first census of Mexico, 1793, gave four and a half mill ion inhabitants. iJIUll'KMO I'RITIM \M1 HIS IVUiilllT: CHEAP MONEY 85 2. Criollo (creole). Born in America of European parents (Spanish or French). 3. Mestizo. Born of a white father and Indian mother. 4. Mulatto. Born of a white father and negro mother. 5. Zambo (source of our "Sambo"). Cross of In dian and negro. Called also " Chino." 6. Indians. 7. Negroes. As to subdivisions, the Laws of the Indies fixed the following standards : Quadroon (cuarteron), one-fourth negro, three-fourths white. Quinteroon, one-eighth negro, seven-eighths white. The courts were frequently appealed to to " whiten " families into which too much color had crept. Some times when the analysis was a trifle involved, the ver dict was rendered, que se tengan por bianco — " that they be taken for white." There is, by-the-way, one fresh breath of humanity common not only to Mexico but to all the despotisms, oligarchies, and plugged-coun- terfeit republics south — the negro is held to be hu man. There is, nowadays, no more miscegenation than with us ; but the Man and Brother has far greater rights in all Spanish America than in the land of the free and the home of the brave. In the Pullman, in the first-class hotel, the theatre, and wherever else, he is just as good as any one. This is partly because hu man slavery was never a divine institution in those colonies. While this statement may derive a shriek from those who have learned history by not studying it, it is strictly true. Only the gross ignorance of cen- 86 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION , turies of closet historians biased by political and re ligious prejudice, untravelled, and apparently pledged not to read any original source, could have brought us to such basic misconception of the Repartimiento and the Encomienda as to class them with our own slave- holding. Both were temporary devices ; both were apprenticeships of the Indian to civilization; both bore as hard on him as a training school with us bears on lazy or unwilling boys ; both were training schools, as merciful in design and as justified by the graduates as our own. To such as find the testimony of Hum boldt inefficient, there could be no more useful read ing than the laws of Spain as to the aborigines — the highest minded, most complete, and most noble " In dian policy " ever framed by man. VIII AN UNFAMILIAR PAGE BUT what may seem the most millennial function of the Ministerio de Fomento is that it encourages even — literature ! Lest this announcement cause an inva sion of Mexico by our waste-basketed hordes (whose only present refuge is the shrewd but cruel publica tions set on the corner-stone that all other editors are conspiring against genius), let me hasten to assure them that this paternal government would precisely not publish their efforts. Mexico, of course, has as yet neither great publish ing-houses nor a great book-market, and there is no one to undertake a publication as a legitimate invest ment. Yet Mexico is — as she has been for centuries — far from poor in deep students, broad historians, and able literary men. Here steps in the Ministry of Encouragement, backed by its own splendid publish ing-office and by a conservative judgment, and fathers the issue of whatsoever book is deemed worthy. It has done a great deal for modern Mexico. It pub lishes the great historic contributions of my honored friend Lie. Alfredo Chavero, and those of the lamented Icazbalceta ; the valuable monographs of Penafiel and Garcia-Cubas ; even matter so literary as the charm ing volumes of my muy leal young comrade Luis 88 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION Gonzalez Obregon — who is doing for the legends of colonial Mexico what has been so superbly done for those of colonial Peru by Ricardo Palma. All these works are suitably issued ; and some, like the great codices, at enormous expense, and in a style which could not be surpassed anywhere. Meantime the author pays for — the white paper, at most ! The whole literary impulse in Mexico is an honor able story, and strangely interesting. A romance as chivalrous as the Crusades, and far more startling— the supreme adventure, indeed, in the history of man — the Conquest, curiously enough, seems to have in spired thought rather than exaltation. It has never had its Homer, nor even its Virgil ; but its Caesar, its Pliny, its Strabo, and its Herodotus — they have risen by twins and triplets. There was never such another text for balladry ; but the poets seem to have been too busy marching superhuman marches, conquering " empires," and studying the overwhelming problems the New World set upon their slate. A few did break unpredestined into heroic verse — like the " Peregrino Indiano " and dashing Villagran, arcades ambo of sor ry verse, though precious chronicling.* But it is striking all along that these soldiers of fortune — hu man enough to fight for gold, feudal enough to fight as hard for the holy faith, crazy enough even to ad venture for pure adventure's sake — were, after all, of the calibre intellectually sobered rather than made drunk by the realities which outdazzled all dreams. * Villagran's epic of the New Mexican conquest is one of the most important and one of the most interesting " sources " we have on the history of any part of the American Union. AN UNFAMILIAR PAGE 89 Spanish America became, with the Conquest, the most active scene of original study in the world. In 1536 the printing-press began, in the City of Mexico, to embalm the labors of the host of scholars who were attacking the linguistic, geographic, and philosophic mysteries of the New World. Before Shakespeare was born, American literature had its beginnings in a library of volumes printed in America in a score of orig inal American languages, besides the mass in Span ish. The first book printed in the New World was Fray Juan de Estrada's Escala Espiritual para llegar al cielo (" Spiritual Ladder for reaching Heaven "), a translation of S. Juan Climaco. It was printed in the beginning of 1537, but, unfortunately, no copy is known to have withstood the wear and tear of the theological schools, in which it was a text-book. It was printed by Juan Pablos, the first printer in this hemisphere, the foreman of the first American pub lishing-house — that of the famous Juan Cromberger, of Seville. The real credit of these beginnings of Amer- can literature belongs to Fray Juan de Zumarraga, first Bishop of Mexico. This really notable man, in conjunction with the first and greatest of all Spanish viceroys, Don Antonio de Mendoza, made a contract with Cromberger and brought the first printing-press to America. Cromberger (though early Mexican edi tions bear his imprint) never crossed the ocean. After his death (1540) Pablos appears on the portadas as publisher. He was a Lombard ; and, for his circum stance, a good workman. The printing-house was at the southwest corner of the streets De la Moneda and Cerrada de Santa Teresa. The first book left to us of those first printed in America is entitled : 90 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION BREVE Y MAS COMPENDIOSA DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA EN LENGUA MEXICANA Y CASTELLAN A, que contiene las cosas mas necesdrias de nuestra santa fd catholica, para aprovechamiento destos indios naturales y salvacion de sus dnimas. Con licencia y privilegio. The colophon reads : A honra y gloria de Nuestro Senor Jesu-Christo, y de la Virgen Santissima su madre, fud impresa esta DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA por mandado del senor don ERA Y JUAN DE ZUMARRA GA, primer obispo desta gran ciudad de Tenuchtitlan, Mexico, DESTA NUEVA E SPAN A, y d su cost a, en casa de Juan Cromberger, ano de mill y quinientos y treinta y nueve. " Brief and more compendious Christian Doctrine, in the Mexican [Nahuatl] and Spanish languages, containing the most necessary things of our holy Catholic faith, for the benefit of these native Indians and the salvation of their souls. Published by au thority." "To the honor and glory of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Most Holy Virgin his mother, this Chris tian Doctrine was printed to the order of Fray Juan de Zumarraga, first Bishop of this great city of Tenuchtitlan, Mexico, of this New Spain, and at his cost, in the house of Juan Cromberger, year of one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine." The third American book, so far as known, was the Manual de Adultos, of whose last page and colophon I give a facsimile at scale : AN UNFAMILIAR PAGE 91 berroiufloe fbotoslceiSl frcrro? Slosicdos.flrrtta t».rrritj ra.j.rc.n>ij.oo oijt&eemwoa cello la k falua:lee pea paTorps fis^uefetmtifoa oiclpo la k falua.if .rrif.oooeoi^e $h\e\ic ice enerte.i&ila mifma ela fa>.l|.r«:.|.o6oeoije el £!£>ifteno '$ox o5:leedmtflerio6l3owan.rc.riii}.o6D€Oi5€lRo/pptfafoEa fpecielw no pjopjta ipecle fitEa.rfcrrfc oonoe oijc Bqfte ql #>pbera afirma l'er,ppbeca:leeaqfto ql,ppbeta r masq£>pb£ p.Knelmifmorc.oooeoije^emaoaDololcednianoaOoIo.iEnla bo|'a.m".fa3.i.a.mj.re.oonDeot5eoe la TRefurre«i6;!ee Dtrfr«rrea5.ycnl.r€.ri|.DOiiDCDi3C^ambievaca^cftaruo luo.Snla bo/a.ji:n'.laj;t|.re.jTj.JS)oi)Dco{5e7 lor coloca.-tee gloscoloca.^,enlre.finaloonoeoi5eXepertetra:l€elop«ie tra.flrnla bOfa.^rnj.fe5.i^re.rj.T!.Pl'OonoeDJ3C. y el miioo 13 ^ajana:lee^ la ba5ana.yail.1f .rrrt'.oonoe otje S>ia no pet qnaieeoia £ »o peqfia.Snla tora.rrruj.fB3. j.re. j. oonoe 0136 Xepw>no:leetl«peroono.ibilal^.o^'.fa5.j.r^»|oon oeoise.CneloilfltarJeeenlODilarar* C^ni^fniiorcellclJl^miatoe^Dtilroscnlagra'a'uDao^ jE)E>er»co po?maoaoo 6los 1r\eueretMlfimo9 Seno^g 0bif- poodla nueua£fpana ?a fuaerpefasencafa d'guajCronw bcr^cr.SIiio6lnacimlcto*nueftrofenoj3efujLbiflo^jniil; tquini€t03 gqiwr«a.^l .pjj.oias Dimes d ^cjietoe. LAST PAGE AND COLOPHON OF THE THIRD BOOK PRINTED IN THE NEW WORLD Manual de Adultos, Mexico, 1540 The colophon reads, translated : " This Manual for Adults was printed in the great City of Mexico by order of the Most Reverend Bishops of New Spain, and at their expense, in the house of Juan Cromberger. Year of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ one thousand five hundred and forty. On the 13th day of the month of December." The fourth book departed from abstract religion 92 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION to news with a moral, and is entitled (by interpreta tion): Account of 'the frightful Earthquake which Just lately has befallen in the city of Guatemala. A thing of great wonder, and a great example for us all, that we amend our sins and be prepared zvhenevcr God shall be pleased to call us. The colophon carries the imprint of Cromberger and date of 1541 — the year of the catastrophe. That was rapid news-gathering for those days. The terre- moto, of course, is that most dramatic one in North American history in which the Volcan de Agua burst its crater and drowned the young Guatemalan cap ital and thousands of its settlers. Among them was Dofla Beatriz de la Cueva, the wife of Pedro de Al- varado. But of course the bulk of the sixteenth-century books published in America were purely religious — and the great majority of them for the instruction of the Ind ians, who were fast learning to read and write in the schools founded by Pedro de Gante and his fellow- missionaries. There were vocabularies, catechisms, etc., in Nahuatl, Mixtec, Zapotec, Otoml, Huaxtec, Utlatec, Tarasca, Chiapanec, Zoque, Chinantec, Tzen- dal, Chuchona, etc., not to mention books of law, medicine, sermons, history, and the like, in Spanish and Latin. The first wood-engraving printed in the New World was the title-page of Juan Gerson's* Tripartito, 1544. The first music published in America came from * Perhaps the real author of the Imitation of Christ, general ly attributed to Thomas a Kempis. plena Dommustecu, THE FIRST ENr.RAVINT, I'IMIl.ISHED I\ THE NEW WORLD (From the Tripartita, Mexico, 1544) AN UNFAMILIAR PAGE 93 this press, in 1584 — a beautiful Psaltery in red and black, full of engravings and illuminated initials. It has seemed to me worth while to dwell a little upon this phase, since our collective innocence as to pioneer scholarship shows scant amelioration. Be tween the time these papers came out in Harper s fidvcfperaezpcrbom Sntiptwiu* &^3 3 €>c eft pieceprom mcnrmwotligatiefn m jii piccmmcut Diletf voaeeco toamen. pfalmaa 109, THE FIRST MUSIC PRINTED IN AMERICA From the Psalterium AmpAonariutn, Mexico, 1584 Magazine and their speedy preparation for book publi cation, two prominent critical journals of the United States have gravely announced — one, that " the first book published in America was the Bay Psalm-Book, 1640 "; the other, that the Jesuit Relations (printed in France, beginning after 1610) were " the very first beginnings of American literature" — defining the 94 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION term as literature written in America and concerning America. Ignorance always dies hard ; doubly hard when religious and political prejudice beat under its ribs. Another very striking point in the literary history of Mexico — and one wholly without parallel in ours — is this: In the first generation after the Conquest there was already in Mexico a band of Indian authors, like Tobar, Zapata, Tezozomoc, Chimalpain, Camargo, Pomar, the Ixtlilxochitls (Antonio, Fernando A., and Fernando P.), and others, whom no student of Ameri cana can ignore. Cortez, like Caesar, wrote his own commentaries ; and it is curious to remember that up to 1830 no book was ever so handsomely published in the United States as the Lorenzana edition of the Letters of Cortez in Mexico in 1770. In all our own frontier- ing I know no chronicle which half-way reaches the human interest of the True History of Bernal Diaz del Castillo — the ancient conquistador who rose up in Guatemala and his old age to write because the closet historian already "told so many lies." If he some times grumbles a bit, so a soldier may whose teeth are already fallen ; but his story is so square and straight and full of heart, so frank and unpretentious, and withal so simpdtico, that I never knew the man or woman who began it but devoured it through, and went back to read it again, and came to away of pick ing it up when hours were heavy. No wonder he lived past his hundred years! Of the long and brilliant list of colonial poets, his torians, and philosophers, here is no room for detail. Nor of the later lights, like " El Pensador Mexicano "* * Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi. THE LITTLE CHARRO AN UNFAMILIAR PAGE 95 and Acufia. Nor of those who hold the Mexico of to day up to its best literary traditions — like the few I have named, and Salvador Diaz Miron (foremost of living Mexican poets, though he occupies a cell in San Juan de Ulua), and Juan de Dios Peza, the graceful improvisador of the hearth-side, and many more. The single-heartedness of letters in a land wherein authorship has not taken stature as an alternative from waitering and counter-jumping, stands out strongly in the wide affliction over the death of Prieto. It is a simple and genuine grief, such as more involved socie ties less and less feel. Perhaps quite as striking proof of the very primitive social atmospheres of the awakened republic, is the fact that this most original and most popular of Mexican poets was long a promi nent figure in national politics — and an honor to them. His eloquence saved Juarez in Guadalajara; and his patriotism, fervid in ideals and spotless under tempta tions, was as signal as his literary gift. He was Secre tary of the Treasury under Arista, Alvarez, and Juarez ; and in the sequestration of the Reforma the almost in calculable estates of the Church passed uncounted through his hands. But fancy Longfellow being called to the cabinet ! Guillermo Prieto, whose fine career was closed by death March 2, 1897, was not only the dean of modern Mexican poets, but probably also the most valuable to his contemporaries and posterity of all the list. He was in effect the Mexican laureate, not because the greatest poet, but because the most national. His brilliant imagination and clear perception ranged not upon a borrowed Parnassus, but in the no less inspir ing and much fresher Mexico of his day; and the 96 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION romances of his Musa Callejera will never lose their charm. They will remain not only favorites of the soil, but precious documents to the historian and student of manners. They paint exactly and vividly the types of the times now gone — and perhaps nowhere else so well portrayed — at once the china of the beaver skirts and the seiiorita curst of the tenements, the charro in wide calzoneras and somhxzxo jar ano, and the ignorant but supercilious polio of the aristocracy. All the pas sions and all the ideals of the people, their vices and their virtues, found in Prieto their most sympathetic and their most graphic translator. His Romancero Nacional, which sings arms and the men of the Mexi can Independence, while equal in popularity, and per haps in quality, will hardly last so long. Events (and the years from Hidalgo on were thick - starred with gallant deeds) have always chroniclers enough, but types and manners pass and are forgotten. Since the Conquest itself, with its wholly unparalleled ethno graphic records, there has been no other epoch of Mexican life so perfectly pictured in literature as that which the " Highway Muse " made her own. Prieto was born in the capital, February 18, 181 8. The accompanying portrait, with his daughter Maria, is the last picture ever made of him, and is an un usually faithful likeness of the brave old poet. The standard of critical appreciation is high even with the newspapers — as is the rule in Latin America. The capital has twenty -seven dailies (including two excellent ones in English), and more weeklies of all sorts than one would care to count. These papers do something to fill the gap in literature. Like Spanish- American papers in general, they are greatly given to AN UNFAMILIAR PAGE 97 literary supplements, reprinting now some European novel, and quite as often a rare " source " on Mexico. A frank, dignified opposition organ is published in the very home of the central government. There is no sensational journalism in Mexico. The newspapers are modelled after Continental rather than United States fashions. One is always impressed by the lack of " nose for news " — particularly news that smells. IX CLUBS NOT TRUMPS It is not pleasant for the Saxon traveller in a land of infinite good-breeding to confess the fact that such of the mother -tongue as befalls his ear upon the street comes very largely under the " bigod " classifi cation. There are fine types of American and .Eng lish manhood in Mexico, types from and creditable to metropolis and frontier ; but the wayfarer is some times given to wonder where they are. The truth is, of course, that they are about their business, leaving the Queen's and our English to be carried on the street by another sort. Long experience in the lands to the south, and in many of them, breeds vast respect for Spanish-American tolerance. Outside of the individuals of decency, two broad classes of Americans invade these countries — and make it a wonder of forbearance that their next country man is not shown the door. One class (now perforce dwindling) proceeds upon the pickhandle policy. If one of these blanked dagos does not comprehend or is a trifle slow — why, fetch him one over the head with the nearest club. This is the way to get respect among the bloody heathen. The other class has for fetich not the bull, but the fox. It is self-evident that people who do not talk English must be dishonest. CLUBS NOT TRUMPS 99 Therefore, if you would succeed in business, " fix " them. In both classes it is equally etiquette to blacken the virtue of the women, the courage of the men, and the brains of the race, loudly and in all companies. Here are the basic reasons why so many Americans have made shipwreck in Mexico ; or, succeeding finan cially, have earned the contempt of the people and of self-respecting travellers. Much as the}' are other things, they are most of all fools. Fancy a Turk. without a word of English, going into business in New York on those principles. The day of the pickhandle is played out. The Mexican peon is ignorant and slow, but he is a Solo mon beside those who kick him. And any man who is fit to control any men (naturally beginning with himself) can manage them and get good work out of them. The Chihuahua water-works, for instance, were built by an American engineer, John E. McCurdy, with only one assistant. All the workmen were Mex ican peons; and I know personally that for that hon orable type of the American rover the poorest peon in Chihuahua would do anything. And it is so in my experience of all Latin America — as a fairly sen sible man might know without experience. As for the "fixers." they waste money (generally that of other people) and gain contempt. There is no more need of bribery in modern Mexico than in New Hampshire. For that matter, I have ransacked Spanish America with as little friction, perhaps, as traveller ever had there — and with not the downiest temper known of men — and the largest bribe I ever offered was a native cigarette and a decent greeting. The American corporation which does by far the 100 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION widest business (geographically) in Mexico, and has most numerous touch with the people — Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Express — conducts its affairs there, as at home, with something resembling common -sense. It has never found it necessary in Mexico to knock down and drag out any one ; nor yet to rub its thumb upon its two first fingers under any Mexican's nose. It has found money and honor in the republic ; while tup penny hucksters have gone smash by taking the Mex icans for fools, slaves, and menials. " How are you getting on ?" asked an American, in the capital, of the head of a great enterprise. " First rate. And you ?" " We-ell, not to brag of. I don't know why, either, for our manager is as sharp as tacks. You bet he won't stand any d — d nonsense !" " Maybe you would do better," said the successful man, quietly, " to find a manager who knows when and where to stand a little ' nonsense.' You remem ber that we are not at home. We have come to do business among a people whose ways are not our ways. It may be wise not to try to change them all at once." An astounding chapter might be written on the barbarisms and the solecisms of the too general tour ist and fortune-seeker, but I have not the heart to spin it out. Some of the expositions I have seen with these eyes could hardly find credence among those who have never observed their neighbor away from home. They would make an amusing list, per haps; but, after all, the point of the joke is turned the wrong way for an American to hug. He may not lack the sense of humor, and yet not find supremely CLUBS NOT TRUMPS IOI " funny " the drunken consul, the misfit minister, the lay boor, whose antics discredit not them alone, but the country of whose good name he is tender. He may smile at the ignorances which are so deep as to seem incredible ; but the heartlessness and soullessness of it all are more like to turn him sad. I cannot do justice to the infinite courtesy of a peo ple to whom so many strangers show so little. From beggar to prince, the Spanish American has the heri tage of breeding. His address would grace a court, and it lends a fine distinction to the hovel. There have been travellers so naive as to tax him with in sincerity. "Your house, sir," he says to you; and these sheer Saxons are deeply grieved that he does not give them a bill of sale. That he gives a hospital ity no land ever surpassed — and few equal — is noth ing. He says the house is yours, and he doesn't move out. How insincere ! Perhaps we have pre served, amid the evolution of American humor, some trace of the insular ancestry. As a matter of fact, I have found the Spanish American not only of incomparably more tact, but of fully as deep sincerity as my countrymen. Speech is currency ; and the more flowery, the more discount from its face. But it is sure that when the don says " Tu casa, sefior" it is actually yours for all the uses of an honored guest, and to an extent that does not in any way obtain between us and strangers in our homes. Hospitality is Latin in fact as in name. Perhaps the most striking quality of this courtesy is its democracy. The Saxon, even in a republic, is po lite to his friends and superiors, if he can be polite at all. The Iberian is polite to every one — to his ser- 102 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION vants, the beggar at the curb, the foreigner with nose aloft. In more than a dozen years of intimacy with his lands I have never found one flaw in his manners. A courtesy has never been denied me in Spanish America — and in my business I have had to look for courtesies at the hands of presidents and paupers. My travels have not been with reference to ease, but to find out ; and in a majority of them I have been dependent upon the penetrability of the people — for where one goes who would really learn an undevel oped country, money is not enough. No door was ever shut to me by any Spanish American, nor even by any Indian of Spanish speech, in the wildest and poorest corner between Colorado and Chile. I have been gently forced to sleep on the one bed of a hovel while for me the aged hosts slept on the dirt floor ; I have come in the tatters of a long mountaineering to a princely hacienda and found a prince's welcome, not as Anybody, but as a man. For a trifling example, in this last overrunning of Mexico the photographs I wished to make called me upon over three hundred roofs — of hovels and palaces, stores and churches — and I remember every one of them for a pleasure, savored by the unvarying courtesy which robbed my wholesale trespass of its natural reluctances. X THE MAN When you have passed through Purgatory (and in Mexico one need not even take the trouble to die for the itinerary, since that is a pet name of the salon contraesquina from the Hall of Ambassadors), when you have left to their pain and surprise at your prefer ment the fifty or so of politicians, concessionaires, senators, hacendados, and Indian servant-folk, cooling- themselves-the-heels in " Limbo," then you are on the threshold of a notable experience. For you are to meet what is probably the greatest figure — as it is un questionably the most romantic — in the world's poli tics this half-century. To any unglazed wits there is sudden and sharp significance in the way yonder door swings. An un prepared Indian would know instantly that Somebody was coming ; for here already is the clew of force in equilibrium. The figure which advances by something so wholly unlike the strenuous Saxon stride, so equal ly impressive, yet far more graceful ; so supple as a puma, yet without a suggestion of stealth ; so instinct at once with frankness and dignity, with power and ease — it is, for all the distracting windows at its back, as gallant a presence as one will know. You hear a mellow, direct, expressive voice, you grasp a fine, firm, 104 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION dry hand, and before you know it you are seated vis a-vis with the creator of a new factor in American destiny. It may occur to you presently that, as the chairs stand, your face is given over to be cross-examined by the windows, while his is excused by the shadow. Pos sibly you will also come to realize that this is the least searchlight turned upon you. Yet as your pupils grow wonted and you find your way deeper into those remarkable eyes, which are, after all, not abusing their advantage, there is no feeling of embarrassment. They are eyes that can read — you will not need to be told that — and eyes that mean to read. But they are frank, courteous, friendly eyes ; and you are sure you like them — and sure you like everything that goes with them. It seems to be established that no man has talked with Diaz directly, free from the unapt interpreter's awful aid, but came away a little awed, a great deal impressed, and veiy largely won. It has been one secret of this marvellous career that it is impossible to doubt the sincerity of the man. It is vouched for by face and voice, and inheres in the very carriage — no scrub can walk quite like that. At the same time the impression of reserve is fully as strong. It is a purely leonine type — not by bulk or shag, but by look and port — and with no suggestion of the fox or his cousin wolf. A man of five feet eight, erect as the Indian he is disproportionately confounded with, quick as the Ibe rian he far more nearly is, a fine agreement of unusual physical strength and still more unusual grace, with the true Indian trunk and the muscular European limbs, Diaz is physically one man in twenty thousand. THE MAN 105 The single infusion of aboriginal blood (and that at the beginning of this century) is an inheritance much more visible in his figure than in his face. The feat ures and expression are essentially of Spain ; it is only in full repose that the face recalls that certain hauteur and inscrutableness of the first Americans. But the superb, deep chest and capacious barrel, the fortress of vitality, are pretty certainly derived from an out -door ancestry. On the other hand, just such legs do not grow upon the Indian, nor upon any ath lete who has not made conquest of the horse. This man seems to have taken the best from both types. There are young old men everywhere, but this is the freshest veteran in my knowledge. By the lithe step, the fine ruddy skin, whose capillaries have not yet learned to clog or knot, by the keen, full eye, or the round, flexible voice, it seems a palpable absur dity to pretend that this man has counted not only sixty-seven years, but years of supreme stress. If in forty of them he ever knew a comforting certainty, it must have been by faith and not by sight ; for from boyhood to middle life his face was always against overwhelming odds. If fair fluency in reading physical tokens has im pressed upon the visitor a certain conviction, the con versation is definitive. Some men look and walk like gods — and talk as if there were none. I have known a very few whose address carried the same contagion, and one whose words were as compelling, but never another man whose language, purely as a medium, so captured me. It is not the Spanish of the Real Acadhnia — itself a gallant thing to be heard, for its very circuitousness and melody and courtly indirec- 106 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION tion. Nor yet is it anything wherewith the dilettanti of Madrid might quarrel. It is, though Spanish, em phatically modern, and withal reconciles that lurking contradiction. It is the most luminous, direct, sin ewy speech I have heard in any tongue — an unlisped Spanish which leads one to forgive, for the moment, the harshened sibilants of Mexico ; a Spanish swift but unhurried ; concise as Greek and as lithe ; force ful as clean Saxon, compact as an Indian tongue, nut ty as French, and musical as no civilized vernacular can be, outside of Spanish. Yet it is the music of the bugle, and not of the usual guitar. A paradox, un doubtedly; for at once it is poised, yet flies like an arrow to the butt ; the perfection of courtesy, yet not carelessly to be disputed ; absolutely free from the weak vice of epigram, but concise beyond parallel. I have never talked with another man by the hour at a time without catching him in one waste word. This, at one's first meeting with Diaz, is one's first astonishment, and may linger among the latest. Clear speech means clear thought — assembled, marshalled thought ; and speech so marvellously diagrammatic must refer to unusual mental processes. And even while one glows at this apparently unconscious past- mastery of words, the larger presence enters. This speech is no mere trick of mouth, but the medium of a very unusual mind. It might be rash to lug into any comparison the Iron Chancellor, but of actual rulers, republican or dynastic, there certainly is not another — if there may have been one — so " posted " as the man of Mexico. Off-hand, without hesitation and with accuracy (as I have often been at pains to verify), he gives whatso- THE MAN 107 ever detail is desired of whatsoever branch of govern ment. He is more ready than the contractors them selves as to the men and money using in some great work. The commanders of the military zones can tell you (in twice the words) as much each of his own scope as Diaz can tell you of the entire field. The superintendent of education in a district may be as informative (if you give him time) about the schools in his charge as the creator of the Mexican public- school system is about the districts en masse. It is an open secret in the capital that the President not in frequently worsts his ministers in their own fields. Not all of the cabinet are wonders ; but all are able men, and at least three of them extraordinary ones.* I do not mean to lay all this to the doorstep of genius. It is not more due to his most rare faculty of grasp than to his enormous application for the mastery of every question. And — a genuine test of breadth — he is not afraid to say " I do not know." He ventures no opinion in things he has not measured. This strangely direct and pregnant speech, a model of saying most in speaking least, runs, nevertheless, with all the sincerity and the winningness of a boy. It is conclusive without being oracular, balanced yet without self-consciousness, engaging yet reserved, es pecially as the subject warms him. It was when we came to schools that the "autocrat" came suddenly * The cabinet is composed as follows : Foreign Relations (and Vice-President of the Republic), Ignacio M. Mariscal ; Interior, General Manuel Gonzales Cosio ; War, General Felipe B. Ber- riozabal ; Communications, General Francisco Z. Mena; En couragement, Manuel Fernandez Leal; Justice and Public In struction, Joaquin Baranda ; Treasury, Jose Ives Limantour. 108 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION to his feet and translated me to a distant inner room and showed me his private maps. The big plan of the capital bristled with pins, their heads of three col ors (this was just before the federal round-up of schools in July, 1896 ; now there are but two colors) ; and his knowledge of the schools all and several, when and where and how, was as graphic as the map itself. It was less surprising when he spread upon the same en gineer's table accurate charts of the republic, with their like pin-head kaleidoscope — but now pins for troops and regiments, for horse, foot, and artillery. So much may be expected of a right soldier ; but that absolute grip on the situation by-and-large, and that ability to put it within the fist of a rank outsider at one handful, are no part of the usual military trap pings. The conceit is still a little yonder which could make me dare pretend to translate that arrowy speech into any English within my grasp. But of our conversa tions there were two things so typical they should be saved in what paraphrase they may. When once we spoke of the school system he has created for Mexico — the theme which more than any other seemed to kindle him — and when he had given in five minutes an astonishing bird's-eye view of a huge field, he add ed (it seemed to me with a fine mingling of dignity and pathos): "And the English is compulsory. So when we the old are gone, Mexico will have two idioms." And again, when the theme was the steps up which, one by one, he has handed Mexico from intermittent anarchy to sure peace, he said, gravely and with that same terseness : " It needed something of the strong GENERAL DIAZ IN 1866 THE MAN 109 hand [la mano dura]. But every year it could relax. Now, though there are some who do not love ' Por- firio,' all love peace. So the fist is wide open. There is full liberty — free schools, free ballot, free speech, free press. They may do what they will, so they do not fire a gun at me." This is very tame beside the idiomatic Spanish in which it was said, but it is indexical. Here is the key-note of modern Mexico — a " dictatorship " which has spent ungrudgingly its blood and its care for the country's progress. It is this man, whose eye and voice and step belie the half his years, that has wrought the Mexican mir acle. And if he has put a new face on his country, it is not a whit more remarkable than the transforma tion he has wrought upon his own shoulders. This has been a transfiguration of which I know no paral lel. Making due allowance for the change of fashion in facial landscape-gardening, Porfirio Diaz was not from the start visibly frontispieced by fate for all that he has become. Within a youth's memory he wore the mere features of a soldier. Even in the seventies he might have been a chief of rurales. But to-day his face is unmistakable, and a proverb for " the hand somest man in Mexico." By sheer features this is not true ; but by the collective impression it is. In a generation he has given himself a new face, and even made over the shape of his head. In all the breadth of a regenerated republic there is no more striking monument to the thought it has needed to turn the Mexico in which Juarez died into the Mexico of to day than the very head of the man who did it. This may naturally raise the question just where IIO THE AWAKENING OF A NATION and when his real greatness of spirit began. What was his first motive to the Presidency? Was it as purely patriotic as his military career unquestionably had been ? Or was it a personal lust — later tamed and purified by responsibility and the evolution of events ? Was it the professional revolution of inde pendent Latin America — an Out trying to get In — or was it something more prophetic? One's first pre sumption may easily be — as mine was before I had earned any right to presume — that the revolt against Juarez and the upsetting of Lerdo were rather less nobly inspired than their sequel. It is good history as well as good morals that no man can play a part absolutely and always. If he be acting, he will sometimes forget his role, and we shall catch him. If he is never inconsistent, then he can not be making believe. The career of Diaz seems to me to stand that test, for it has been logical in every step. The Pretender could not have known all he was to do ; but he certainly knew very well what he was do ing. He saw the consummate need of his centrifugal country, and the only man who could fill it. Some thing more or less like usurpation had become the recognized highway to the Presidency — not an incum bent, since the Independe'ncia had an absolutely clean title of election — and among the periodic crowd of usurpers he knew one who could lift the country per manently out of the reach of usurpation. If under our notions of democracy we cannot quite grasp the premise, we can at least read the logic of his demon stration. From the first he has walked a straight and narrow path towards the consistent goal. A cavalier might well refuse the advances of his country's foes, THE MAN III but only a patriot would have declined his country's proffers as too generous for her own good. There was nothing parvenu in the penniless lad who refused pay for his first military service ; nor in the struggling youth who declined the law degree that Judrcz gave him, and studied two years longer, amid arduous du ties, to earn it ; nor in the young officer who several times declined to be promoted over the heads of his ciders, lest it create jealousies harmful to the cause ; nor in the sudden popular idol who could have had the Presidency at Maximilian's hands — and with it the deliverance of his country — but would not, be cause Jiuirez was his President. This may not be so picturesque a conclusion as the notion that here was a sheer usurper, gradually trans formed to a high patriot by the unfolding of events and of his own eyesight, but it seems totally better with the record. We have reasonable authority, too, for knowing a man by his fruits. Several Presidents of Mexico have tried to do something for their coun try besides sitting at its head; not all of them togeth er have done for it what Diaz has. It would doubt less be a poor creature who had no ambitions of his own. A fit selfishness is the datum-plane of humani ty, and only above that is man's altitude measured — by the measure wherewith he subordinates that ambi tion to other things, or other things to that ambition. Diaz has never needed a guardian, but neither has his country, since he c.une up. Bearing on the same point from another side is the attitude of his present authority. No Governor in our States is more accessible than this President, plus. lie wears no body-guards, no hedges, no ostcn- 112 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION tation. It is not precisely a czar who gives audience to laborers, rides unattended in a street car, and often walks to his residence alone, or to church with no more retinue than his wife. A man of warm friend ships as of stanch resentments, he does not abuse ei ther. He may not forget, but he does shelve, a personal grudge whose object can be a citizen of use to the republic, and his whole tenure of office is full of in stances. As to his friends, he remembers a certain fine discrimination between Porfirio Diaz and Presi dent Diaz. No one is allowed to become his shadow, and he is scrupulous that his public goings and com ings shall not be inseparably associated with certain companions. For, in his own words, " Nothing so ir ritates a people as the insolence of favorites — and all favorites tend to insolence." This, of course, is a matter of business judgment. Outside what he conceives to be a ruler's duty to the public, he is not only accessible, but notoriously warm-hearted. His career is as full of handsome friendships and tender mercies as of uncompromising firmness. One incident, which I believe has not been published, is illustrative of the man. In June, 1895, the President was invited to Catorce,* the chief min ing camp of San Luis Potosf, to inaugurate the great electrical plant (the first of its kind in Mexico) at the Santa Ana Mine. A large company of the foremost men in Mexico had come up with him from the capi tal, and the mine-owners had made a fitting fiesta. * La Purisima Concepcion de Alamos de Catorce. The Real (mining camp) was founded in 1773, when Sebastian Co- ronado and Bernabe Antonio de Zepeda discovered its veins. They made it produce nearly four millions a year, THE MAN 113 When Diaz appeared at the works the laborers went wild, and surged forward upon the Presidential party. A stranger might have fancied this tattered and mine -stained horde about to swallow up the little knot of broadclothed statesmen. One grizzled old Indian in the van hurled his shabby hat aloft with a stentorian shout above all the clamor, " Viva nuestro tata /"* and, rushing upon the nonplussed President, caught him a tremendous hug that fairly lifted him from his feet. Diaz involuntarily fell back a step. Then his inscrutable face suddenly resolved in a smile, half humorous, half tender ; and as his friends el bowed him out of the crush they saw a tear creeping down each cheek. As the military history of Diaz in many ways sug gests that of Grant — though he had none of Grant's technical preparation, and led far smaller armies, and had always to create them himself out of next to nothing, forging invincible steel from the peon mud — so does his personal simplicity. At the opening of the lips the resemblance ceases ; but there was the same quietness of taste. No man of Latin blood could disregard the demands of ceremony in a ruler ; no man of any blood could be more modest in them. When and where etiquette compels, Diaz is splendid ; and none can better carry off the pomp and circum stance of state than this ascended soldier, who would be at homa in any court. But outside the necessities of occasion, he goes as unfrilled as our President ; scrupulously neat and scrupulously simple in his dress. * " Long live our father !" Tata is at once as affectionate as " daddy," yet reverent. The Indians use it of God. 114 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION And while a tyrant may be unvain, tyrants do not walk loose among their serfs. There is a deeper test of balance than unpreten- tiousness amid the temptations of practically supreme power. Diaz has remained to this day a man of the strictest habits. He has no vices — not even that sweetest and most human vice which is so easy to an autocrat. Abstemious, methodical, tireless ; work ing with remarkable despatch a long day, yet scrupu lous that not even the nation shall quite rob his family of him ; early to bed and early to rise ; always busy but never hurried ; a sturdy walker ; a superb rider of superb horses; a real hunter — as frontiers men count hunters, and not by the category of titled trigger-pullers who butcher tame, fenced game — the private life of this curious man is as wholesome as his administration, and has broadly aided it. It has been a greater thing to conquer the hearts than the hands of a nation. I can remember when to scratch a Mexican college-boy was pretty generally to find an anti-Porfirista ; and every priest's robe cov ered a Tory. Why ? Well, the radical objection to the President was — that he was President. Sopho- moric minds, overfed with reading, looked more to the shadow than to the substance. They tended — as their elders sometimes tend — to remember the theory and forget the fact. They failed to notice that all of a republic is not the license of all to misgovern them selves ; that peace, security, the equal conservation of every man's right, are as significant of democracy as is the name of an office ; and they were restive over a matter of definition. It was almost precisely the same " objection to federal interference " upon which SENORA DIAZ, CALLED " CARMEI.ITA, THE IDOL OF MEXICO' THE MAN 115 the people of the United States sat en banc a few months ago, and gave verdict for defendant. But this last barrier between Diaz and the inner hearts of his people has gone down before his person ality. It was partly by la mano dura, but more by the clear head and the clean record. It might be too much to call any man unselfish ; it is enough when a man acts unselfishly — and this is the root of this man's complete mastery. It has become inevitable, even to the most unthoughtful stiff-neck, not only that he could hold his place, but that he held it in trust. Within a few years — even within his term just ended — the last opposition to Diaz has died a natural death. Even the Church party, which delivered its country up to the Intervention of the Philistines, sees now that it would be folly to exchange a just opponent for a partisan of its own. The hold of Diaz on his countrymen began in his extraordinary military career. Not only its brilliancy, but its patriotism, kindled hero-worship to a blaze. In the longest and darkest night that Mexico ever knew, he rose early and shone steadfast, the star of hope for national autonomy. His people, his govern ment, and his foe all came to recognize him as the first soldier of Mexico. Upon the head of this, to general surprise, he has earned a still rarer distinction. The greatest general in Mexican history, he has also proved himself the greatest statesman. And no less than his record of war and administration, his private character has conquered the love of those whose admiration was already stormed. His relations as husband, father, and man have all been to the point. His first wife, mother of his three children, was a lovable girl, who 11,6 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION died too soon to share his full greatness ; but when, in 1883, he married Carmen Romero Riibio, the daughter of an old antagonist, he gave Mexico a universal idol. A young woman of unusual beauty of person and character, highly educated (in the United States), fluent in French and English as in the best Spanish, " Carmelita," as she is lovingly called by all Mexico, rich and poor alike, has been her husband's comple ment not only in the home but in the nation. To the social charm of a high-bred Spanish woman, and the heart of universal womanhood, she adds the hori zons of a modern education. Gracious and unspoiled, prominent in all benevolences, and a model in the exigent Spanish traditions of the homekeeper, she has won love beyond any other woman in Mexican history. The Presidential family is a pleasant one all through. Of the two daughters, one is married. The son, Por- firio junior, has recently taken his degree as civil en gineer, after as stiff a course as if he had been a peon's boy, and through a final examination which was made unusually rigorous by his father's wish. " The Presi dent's son," said Diaz, "must have nothing which he has not surely earned." It was an innovation when Diaz declined to live in the national palace. Part of the year he resides in his private house in the Street of the Chain, but part in the historic castle of Chapultepec — the fabled (and only fabled) summer home of Motecuzoma, a palace of the Viceroys from Galvez* down, and the chosen spot of Maximilian and Carlota. The rock Hill of * It cost that Virey $300,000 for his improvements there. THE MAN li the Grasshopper, set amid immemorial a*::tz':uc?es. has at its feet the making of the noblest park in the world, cf its size; and no other palace in any land commands so superb a view. Below, the strong spring of " Montezuma's Bath " wells up under the gigantic trees: ar.d the twin aqueducts, like inconceivable centipedes turned to stone, twist away towards the city : and the outcrop rock is carved with the pic- toglyphs of forgotten Aztec war-captains. Behind is the historic field of Molino eel Rev; and at the top. elbowing the palace, the military academy whose scho:l-bovs were defeated bvthe armv of the United XI THE LADDER One tires of " lives stranger than romance " — in the romances ; but, seriously, it would be a confident novelist who ventured to invent a career like that of Diaz and date it in this century. It reads rather like a chapter from the Crusades than like anything we can realize as modern American. Probably no other ruler since the Lion Heart has run quite such a gamut " of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field ; Of hair -breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach; Of being taken by the insolent foe." Hero of more than fifty battles — and not by helio graph, but at the head of his men — ablaze with deco rations when in full dress, but with not enough med als to cover one apiece the scars that earned them ; leader of desperate charges and defender of forlorn hopes ; half a dozen times prisoner, and as often es caping by the narrowest hazards ; forty years in ser vice, and almost all of it uphill on grades that might have daunted Sisyphus — it is a wonderful story be tween the orphan boy of Oaxaca and the head of modern Mexico. It would be impossible here to go SSsiii^*"^ %m WSSu m mm H t * THE CASTLE OF CHAI'lILTEPEC — .MAIN TERRACE THE LADDER 1 19 into that career with any detail ; but the barest out line is significant. Porfirio Diaz was born in the city of Oaxaca, Sep tember 15, 1830, on the eve of the anniversary of the birth of Mexican independence. There has been confusion as to the locality, and in the city itself are a score of contradictory relations ; so I have taken pains to be fortified over his own hand : " It was in the city of Oaxaca, Street of La Soledad, south side, No. 10, in which house is now a sugar-fac tory." His father, Captain Jose Faustino Diaz, was of Asturian stock which came to Mexico in the first years of the Conquest. He died in 1S33. Dofla Pe- trona Mory, Porfirio's forceful mother, brought him the drop of aboriginal blood, her grandmother having been a Mixteca. She marked the boy out for the Church ; and after finishing with the primary school at seven, taking his turn as errand-boy in a store, and going to the secondary school from eight to fourteen, he entered the seminar}-. The family had lost its modest fortune, and he supported himself by tutoring. Here he fell in the way of the great Zapotec, Juarez, then Governor of the state, who took a generous in terest in the unguessed lad who was to mean so much to Mexico and to Juarez. At seventeen Porfirio volunteered, with some of his comrades, for the war with the United States. To their grief they were not sent to the front, but served as a home militia — the redoubtable company of the " Nothing's Better," as equivocal townsmen dubbed them. Against his mother's hope, his patron's rage, and 120 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION the scandal of the bishop, the young theologue soon decided to be a lawyer and not a priest. Thrown en tirely on his own resources, he kept in the institute by taking pupils and by the slender help of the libra- rianship, secured for him by the Governor. Graduat ing from the four years' course, he entered the law- office of Juarez, becoming also professor of Roman law in his alma mater, and president of the law-club of Oaxaca. His first taste of war was under Herrera, in revolt against the usurper Santa Anna. In the plebiscite Diaz was the only student who dared walk up to the tables and sign against the tyrant ; and for this auda city had to fly for his life. In the revolution which ended with the expulsion of that strange cross of ass and wolf, whom one of the most naive of Mexican folk-songs celebrates in "La pata de Sunt' Anna," young Diaz became Jefe Politico (mayor) of Ixtlan. In this hamlet was the first fair scope for the military bent which had been visible even in his childhood. He drilled the half-naked Indians of his jefatura on Sundays, holding them by dances, a gymnasium, and the like artifices until he had a really valuable militia. When Garcia " pronounced " in Oaxaca, the boy Mayor of Ixtlan marched on that capital with his aborigines and induced the usurper to "take it back"; and upon Garcia's renewal of the pronunciamlento, Diaz returned and took the city, and the small despot fled. For this service Diaz refused the pay proffered him. A little later he resigned his post as Mayor to become Captain in the National Guard at less than PORFIRIO DIAZ, JUN. THE LADDER 121 half the pay, and won his first laurels in crushing the rebellion of Jamiltepec. Badly wounded, he saw the weak point in the insurgent lines, and won the day. It was a week before he reached a doctor, and he car ried the bullet more than a year. In 1858, when Cobos (Conservative) attacked Oaxa ca, Diaz beat him off, pursued him, and whipped him again at Jalapa, fighting against heavy odds. As the war' of the Reforma broadened, Juarez gave the young officer the important post of Jefe of Tehuantepec. In this remote corner, unaided by the beset government and sore pressed by the Conservatives (Church party), he not only held his own for two years in the field, but began to give earnest of administrative skill, straightening out the sorry tangle of public affairs in Tehuantepec, and trying his 'prentice hand at public education and "better government." In April, 1858, at the Hacienda de las Jicaras, he set the pattern of tactics always thereafter characteristic of him — the night march and the daybreak assault. In all his military career it was the case that the other man did not get up quite early enough. In June of the next year he won the important ac tion of the Mixtequilla and a lieutenant -colonelcy. Still weak from the operation to extract the bullet of Jamiltepec, he defended in Juchitan, and then con voyed safely across the isthmus a store of munitions of war, obeying the spirit but breaking the letter of government instructions to destroy it before it should fall into the enemy's hands. In November, Alarcon having captured Tehuantepec, Diaz stormed it at dawn with three hundred men, and took it back for Mexico. In January, i860, with five hundred raw 122 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION troops, he met and routed Cobos's superior force near Mitla, leading the charge at the critical moment. Oaxaca elected him a deputy to Congress; and when, in June, 1861, Marquez attacked the national capital, Diaz hurried from the legislative halls, and, under the orders of General Mejia, defeated the revo lutionists. For this he was made Chief of Brigade of Oaxaca. He pursued Marquez for two months, and August 13, 1861, attacked the rebels by night in Jal- atlaco. It was a hand-to-hand fight, marked by an other of the almost miraculous escapes which gave Diaz the name of an enchanted life, and was another victory for him. But the other divisions of the army were not so successful ; and President Juarez, whose greatness lay rather in steadfastness than in resource, seemed to lack the talent for unification. His sluggishness per mitted the Church party to gain great headway, and at the same time his measures weakened and split the Nationalists. An unpaid army, increased taxes, forced loans, and the suicidal repudiation of the foreign debt not only crippled the government at home, but brought about its ears the armed intervention of France, England, and Spain. When the actual inva sion began, in the spring of 1862, Juarez set the bri gades of Mejia and Diaz to make front against the invaders, while he should gather forces in the interior. A magazine explosion practically wiped out Mejia's command, and Diaz was left to bear the brunt. His brother Felix, who was with him at the front, stood off a thousand zouaves with a handful of lancers until seventy-five per cent, of his men were slain and he was wounded and a prisoner. Watching his chance, THE LADDER I 23 he limped towards his pet horse, flung himself across its back, and escaped through a rain of lead. Porfirio covered the retreat of General Zaragoza on Puebla, checking the French at the hill of Aculzingo. During the siege of Puebla which followed, Diaz held the most exposed position, the road to Amozoc. In the splendid battle which gave Mexico one of her proud est anniversaries, the Cinco de Mayo (May 5, 1862), Diaz and his raw men met on level ground the trained European soldiers of Lorencez, withstood their charges, turned them, and chased them. In January, 1863, the French general Forey laid siege to Puebla with an outnumbering force and by precise stages. In one of the many assaults on the corner held by Diaz the zouaves broke into the first court-yard of his stronghold, the Meson de San Marcos. Diaz ran back alone and fired the solitary field-piece which commanded the gate,* mowing down the fore most of the enemy; then, at the head of his reani mated men, whipped out the storming party and closed the breach. On May 17th the beleaguered city had to capitulate, but Diaz refused to take parole with the other officers, and soon made his escape. At this juncture President Juarez offered to make him Secretary of War or commander of an army corps; but Diaz declined both honors, on the ground that such promotion of so young a man would cause harmful jealousies. He covered the retreat of the * He writes me that the popular story of his having loaded it with cobblestones (for want of ball) is untrue. The gun was loaded, and "all he did" was to run back in the face of the enemy and discharge it. 124 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION national government from Mexico to San Luis Potosi, reorganized the army as commander-in-chief, and ac cepted command of the Army of the East, with juris diction from Puebla to Central America. Marching down from Queretaro with a small force, across the states of Mexico and Michoacan, under the very noses of the enemy, and capturing Tasco en route, he reached Oaxaca and established headquarters. His commission as general of division, the highest rank in the Mexican army, came next. In three years the Nobody of Oaxaca had risen to be second only to the President of the republic, and almost the last hope of his country. The capital, the chief cities and posts, and nearly all the northern states were in the hands of the enemy ; the very government was vagrant ; but down in Oaxaca Diaz kept a "solid south." By a re markable administrative ability he soon put his native state on a business basis, besides garrisoning its im portant points and gathering at his own elbow 3000 drilled men and the cash to handle them. As his strength there led the French to turn more tow ards the north, Diaz began to move up, until Gen eral Brincourt and a large force were sent to check him. In December, 1864, the largest campaign of the Intervention was aimed at him; and early in 1865 these vastly superior forces shut him up in Oaxaca. The self-made Mexican had already become of such consideration that Bazaine took the field against him in person ; and after a vain attempt to bargain (with equal honors in the imperial army as an inducement), pressed the siege at once with vigor and a caution palpably bent on avoiding all slips. The beleaguered tightened their hungry-belts and ran the church-bells THE LADDER 1 25 into cannon-balls. At the beginning of the end, Diaz took his post at the howitzer in a church tower, and kept it hot till every man of the crew but one beside him was slain, and his officers came up and dragged him away. After three weeks of hopeless resistance, Oaxaca capitulated. All the captured officers except three pledged themselves to stand neutral the rest of the war; and Diaz, with the two other stiff-necks, was dungeoned in Puebla. After tunnelling almost to freedom, and being thwarted in several other at tempts to escape, Porfirio finally dodged the turnkey, scaled the prison wall, and got away — with a reward of $10,000 on his head. The Mexican cause was desperate. The French and the traitors held practically all the country's area and resources. The stoic Juarez, almost without armies or territory — only the petty port of Guaymas, pocketed on the Californian Gulf, and the desert state of Chihuahua were left him — had to clap his hat on the government and betake it to Saltillo, to Chihuahua, and finally to Paso del Norte, on our frontier. Such deathless courage as his needed only a hint of success to make it contagious ; but he was not of that un translatable temper which the Spanish call simpdtico, and could not buoy up a people. The hopes of Mexi co were at zero. Diaz understood the need of the hour. It was no time to lay out a deliberate campaign. Swift, sharp blows that should, even if intrinsically trivial, electrify the numbed hopes of the Nationalists — that was what was called for. His escape from Puebla was effected on September 20, and on the 22d, with a hasty handful 126 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION of men, he surprised and captured the garrison, of Tehuicingo. Next day he routed another Imperialist force, and acquired arms and horses with which to fight. A week later he stole a march on the superior force of Visoso, who had come after him, whipped it, and got its cash -box. By littles gathering men and arms, he turned again on the pursuer, led him out into an ambuscade, and smashed his forces. The end of it was that Visoso came over bodily to his brilliant adversary, and did good service for Mexico. These minor but heart-warming affairs began to work like yeast among the despairing patriots ; and as Diaz loomed larger in the south, the fugitive gov ernment and disjointed nation took heart of hope. Dwindled almost to the consequence of guerilla warfare, the one-sided struggle went on with new courage. As the gathering climax of our civil war made clear the inevitable triumph of the Federal government, the moral pressure of the United States began to be felt seriously by the arch-Interventionist ; while unofficial help of men and money commenced to leak over our border, to the discomfiture of his tools. In January, 1866, brought to his tardy senses by the stiffness of Seward, Napoleon rang the death-knell of the Mexi can Empire, proclaiming the withdrawal of his troops in a year. Though so basely deserted, Maximilian had still the forces to keep him for some time master of the field, while his plan of conciliation bade fair to bring him by a better road to success. Judrez could not be thought of as a compromise, being at once the head of the opposition and none too strong with his countrymen. Through Bazaine the Presidency was I I ¦ THE MILITARY COLLEGE, CHAPULTEPEC THE LADDER 1 27 proffered to Diaz ; but the gentleman later of Metz was dealing with a stranger. The Mexican did not even reply. Seeing the French occupied in the north, Diaz be gan in the spring of 1866 to advance his fences, and won several minor engagements. After one of these, the baffled Imperialist Trujeque invited him to a par ley, and when Diaz arrived in the enemy's camp he was fired on by men concealed in an adjacent build ing, but wheeled his horse like a flash and escaped. In face of an enemy superior in numbers, disci pline, and equipment, Diaz whetted his tactics. Sec onded by his dashing brother Felix, he toled the ene my up and down the familiar hills of his boyhood, tired and tantalized and disgusted them — and in the hour of their weariness fell upon them like a cloud - burst. He juggled his small force with con summate dexterity, winning action after action by the precise diplomacy of a New Mexican acquaintance of mine who sold " half " his cattle in the morning on the east side of the mountain, and drove them around to the west side and sold " the rest " in the afternoon. Diaz dragged brush behind his troopers, to kick up the dust of a conquering host ; popped up a handful of cavalry first on one hill and then on another — and conquered the bedeviled enemy almost as much by his ingenuity as by his desperate in-fighting. Of this picturesque campaign the famous battles of Miahuat- lan and La Carbonera were most important. Oronoz, with a larger force and far better armed, doubled and surprised him through the carelessness of a captain. ' Diaz and thirty men stood off the attack till his cav alry could resaddle and his infantry fall in. He 128 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION fought stubbornly until he saw his powder giving out, and then carried his little force in a mad charge upon Oronoz's centre, took the battery, turned it on the Imperialists, and though overwhelmed with numbers stood to the guns till his little reserve came and turned the field to a rout, capturing forty officers, the baggage-train, and the all-important arms. He drove Oronoz into a fortified position, intercepted the Aus trian reinforcements, and after withstanding four charges, turned them, and took their cannon, am munition, and several hundred carbines. Marching straight on Oaxaca, he took his native city from the invaders after a sharp siege. It was prophetic of the man that in this time of stress he founded the Oaxaca model school for girls — the forecast of that system which is working the greatest social change in Mexi can history. When the over-persuaded Emperor — already in motion to sail for Europe — returned to the capital to " stick it out," and took the field in person, the re publican armies focused on the north, and the dis tant Oaxacan was left to work out his own salvation. Again Maximilian attempted to bargain with him — now for a free exit for the French arms. But Diaz quietly referred him to the wandering President. Thrown entirely on his own resources for men, money, and arms — and even at times bled of his lev ies by the worried government — Diaz merely went at it the harder. Known for scrupulousness, he secured voluntary loans where forced loans had been hopeless. Gathering up what men and material he could, he be sieged Puebla, with six field -pieces against her hun dred. It was his third turn at Puebla, twice as be- THE LADDER 1 29 sieged, now as besieger. In the three weeks of the investment he was everywhere, and survived not only the usual perils of the assault, but was dug out whole from under the ruins of an adobe wall. Learning that an army as large as his own was on its way to reinforce the besieged, he ordered all the preparations for withdrawing. Not only the enemy, but his own officers took him to be headed for Mexi co, and both approved his wisdom under the circum stances. But though the Spanish calendar has no special associations with April 1, the date was & pro- pos. That night his army kept their teeth on surpris ing news. Before dawn of April 2 (1867) Diaz made a feint on the south of the city, and followed with a desperate assault all along the line. He took it point by point, by hand ; and at daylight had scored his greatest battle and redeemed Puebla. Amid the reprisals of these embittered struggles Diaz had achieved an honorable distinction for humanity to his prisoners ; and this became no small factor in his successes. Here at Puebla he pardoned the capt ured officers, who fully expected a fusillade, and among them the officious fellow who had added $1000 from his own pocket to the price set on Porfirio's head after his escape from this same city. Marching up from his great victory, the hero of Puebla met the enemy's reinforcements and ran them back to Mexico in "The Five Days' Battle." Shut ting up Marquez in the capital, but unwilling to bom bard that splendid city, Diaz put on the thumb-screws with patient deliberation. Escobedo finally overcame the far inferior force with which Maximilian had held out so long against him in Queretaro. June 19 (1867) 9 130 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION the ill-fated Emperor and his two stanch generals were executed, and next day Mexico surrendered to Diaz. People noted that the victorious general came in unostentatiously, and fell to setting things in order, but that he was ready with a splendid demon stration when the long -exiled President returned, July 15. His task done, Diaz resigned, and after serving for a few months, by request, in a reor ganization of the army, he retired quietly to private life. His native city met him with open arms ; and be sides the highest civic honors gave him in fee simple the estate of La Noria. Here for a couple of years Diaz lived as a peaceful manufacturer of cane sugar and a man of family, having been married by proxy, on the day of his victory at Puebla, to Delfina Ortega y Reyes. The Presidential campaign of 1867 was marked by new convulsions in Mexico. The Progresistas made Diaz their standard - bearer, but with the machine at his back Judrez was declared re-elected, and Diaz re fused to contest. In 1871 the Indian President, who had held office since 1857, was again nominally elected. In behalf of the reforms promised under the Constitution of 1857, but never instituted, Diaz issued from Oaxaca the protest known as the " Pro- nunciamiento of La Noria/' * Judrez was already a changed man by failing health and growing blindness to the needs of the nation. July 18, 1872, death ended this strange, mute, stub born, circumscribed, but great career. Lerdo de Te- * Dated November 8, 1871. Gendarmes Cavalry Engineers Infantry DIVISIONS OF THE MEXICAN ARMY Artillery THE LADDER 131 jada, in whom under Mexican laws rested the right of succession, was elected President in October. He offered Diaz high positions, but the Oaxacan went back to his sugar-making. In 1874 the incumbent, a scholar and a gentleman, but neither a large ruler nor a large patriot, had the country by the ears, partly by mismanagement, partly by showing his design to capture a second term. Revolutions broke out all over the republic, and the famous "Plan of Tuxtepec" was promulgated January 16, 1876. Among the prominent Mexicans proscribed by Lerdo was his most dangerous rival ; and selling off his property for a song, Diaz retired to the United States. In March, 1876, he crossed the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, with forty men, and issued a pronunciamiento. His forty soon multiplied by ten, and marching on the Lerdist garrison of Matamoros, he captured seven hundred prisoners and eighteen cannon ; next beating the larger force of Fuero at Icamole. But finding it impossible to break through to the distant south, he returned to New Orleans and sailed in disguise for Vera Cruz. At Tampico a lot of his Matamoros prisoners came aboard the steamer, and he was recognized. Slipping overboard by night in the shark -infested harbor, he started to swim ashore, but was overhauled and carried back. It was perhaps the most ticklish of all his personal hazards, many and great as they have been. But the purser took a hand, and deceived the captain by throwing overboard a life-preserver. Diaz lay for a week cooped inside the sofa on which the Lerdist officers sat for their nightly card games. At Vera Cruz he got ashore disguised as a sailor, and after many 132 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION startling adventures came back to Oaxaca, where he rallied a force of 4000 men. After the alleged re-election of Lerdo, against which even the president of the Supreme Court rose in re volt, General Alatorre was sent to run down Diaz. At Tecoac he caught him. The battle was long and sharp, but though outnumbered, Diaz won. He held his men in hand till the crisis, and then, leading the charge in person, broke Alatorre 's army in two, and captured its artillery, baggage, and 3000 prisoners. From the field of Tecoac he marched on Mexico. Lerdo fled vid Acapulco to the United States, " tak ing the cash," and on the 23d of November Diaz en tered the capital amid general rejoicing. Five days later he assumed the provisional Presidency, and in April, 1877, was elected constitutional President of the republic. Lerdo promoted several uprisings, which were easily put down, and Iglesias, the Supreme Court claimant, returned from his hiding to private life. This coup made the beginnings of Mexico as a prosperous and modern nation. For the first time in her history since the revolt from viceregal rule she had at the reins a hand strong enough and a head clear enough. Peace rose upon the wrack of fifty years of chaos, and progress followed after peace- Best of all, a national spirit began to be welded among the factions. When the question who could and should and would rule Mexico was taken out of the scramble, the lookers for Presidential lightning be gan to fall into line for more important things ; while those blind enough still to fancy that the new man was just a man, and not the government of Mexico, found out their mistake. A VIEW FROM CHAPULTEPEC THE LADDER I 33 There was singular businesslikeness in every step, and at the same time singular justice. Diaz knew a good man in friend or foe. When he could, he called to his side, and as readily, those who had been his chief enemies as his first friends. Those who would not lend a hand he merely kept where he could have an eye on them. All a revoluciondrio had to do to be persona grata was to turn his talents to the uplifting of Mexico ; and this policy did wonders. The internal policy which has in so few years won statesmen from contemptuous indifference to admi ration began at once. Before one realized it, Diaz was binding his disjointed states by the railroad and the telegraph. In his first year the long arrears of public officials had been paid up. In five years he had more than doubled the national revenues, and not by exactions, but by putting the public business on a civil - service basis. Roads, bridges, light -houses, wharves, public buildings, began to rise as taxes went down. The military and civil codes were revised. The army was reorganized, and the best country po lice in the world, the gudrdias rurales, were created. By them the curse of brigandage, which infested every trail and highway in Mexico, has been wiped out. Reformed diplomatic relations were established with the outer world. The national credit was raised from the dead. And throughout the length and breadth of the long -wasted country the public school began to rise. Primary instruction, normal schools, agricultural and industrial training, fairs, factories, and the devel opment of the soil — by all such steps united Mexico began suddenly to come up out of her low estate. It was some time before she met much welcome ; 134 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION and the cool stand of Diaz in marking a dead-line along the frontier, and advising our General Ord that it must not be overstepped in pursuit of Indians or other things, had like to have made trouble. But a year after his election to the Presidency Diaz was officially recognized by our government, and Grant's visit to Mexico in 1880 did much to civilize our feel ings towards the neighbor republic. Then came the interregnum of Manuel Gonzalez, " El Mocho " — a man of superb courage and of his word, but little other morals — who brought progress to a standstill. In 1880 Diaz lost his wife and her babe — the heaviest blow that has ever reached him amid all his perils. He was for a time Secretary of Fomento under Gonzalez, Senator from Morelos, and Governor of Oaxaca — elected to the last office by a literally unanimous vote. In the spring of 1883 he married his present wife, and their wedding -trip was to the United States. Without activity on his part, and by an overwhelm ing majority, he was re-elected President to succeed Gonzalez, and was inaugurated December 1, 1884, with severe simplicity. Last year he took the oath which inaugurates his present (fifth) term, which has every promise of being his most successful one. The perfection of his remarkable system of public educa tion, and of his hardly less masterly scheme of rail road and harbor development, is the ambition of this term, which is to be his last. And to the question first on our lips — " But when Diaz dies or has done?" — he has, I think, provided the answer. He has set the feet of his people in the paths of progress. He has given them to know, THE LADDER I 35 after fever, how good is the cool draught of peace. He has bound them not more to himself than to one 'another. And when he steps down from his romantic place he will leave a people apprenticed to self-gov ernment — a people not past mistakes, but unlikely to forget the main lesson, with an abundance of able men f.t to be called to the head, and willing to wait to be called. Yet by the very nature of things just such a career can befall but once in a country's life. Such men may return, but not again such opportunity. And among those who have gone before and those who shall come after him, history will reserve an undis puted place for the man who made the United States of Mexico : the second American who has won and worn the title, " First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." At last at peace with herself, Mexico is at peace with all the world — even with the two nations against whom were her only native grudges. She has ceased to hate Spain, thanks to chivalrous General Prim, who even in war kept faith — and the French, who broke it. She even forgives us our consuls, and the tourist whose hat persists in the cathedral. There is not even bitterness in her memories of the miserable war of '4S. For she remembers that Seward's Monroe doctrine ended the Intervention by convincing the lit tle Napoleon that empires were not a good invest ment next door to Uncle Sam. Remembering that, she can forget a good deal. XII SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES If I have given disproportionate space to the City of Mexico, it is simply because it is easier to handle in this narrow elbow-room a fair type of modern Mex ico than to go knight's-jumping over the country in pursuit of disjointed illustrations. The capital fails to be typical only in that it is by more than thrice the largest population in the republic, and that by its sheer momentum of numbers (as well as by its accessi bility to the central government) it takes a rather more impressive stride of progress. It is typical in that every other city in the country is progressing along precisely the same lines and for precisely the same reasons. The difference is of degree, and not of kind. Beautiful Puebla* and lovely Guadalajaraf dispute the second place, each with about 100,000 people. " Puebla the clean" is probably entitled to it, and, at * Founded as La Puebla de los Angeles ; since the Inde pendence, Puebla de Zaragosa. The first mass was said here April 16, 1530. Privileged as a city September 28, 1531. t Founded by Nuno de Guzman in 1 531. He was one of the few conquistadores who were our stage Spaniards — a cruel brute, who was duly punished for his atrocities, as were all the atrocious ones. LA NORIA, PRESIDENT DIAZ'S OLD RESIDENCE IN OAXACA SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES 1 37 any rate, is one of the most attractive towns in the New World. Fray Velarde wrote of it, nearly a cen tury and a half ago : " To me it appeared so abun dant and so fair that it is not inferior to the best cities of Europe. It is, without competition, the best and most principal city of North America after Mexi co." He found there five hospitals and sundry col leges, of which one had over five hundred young In dian scholars. Of the College of the Holy Ghost he says, "I doubt if there be another like it in America." This is to-day the fine State College — the historic building, by-the-way, from which Diaz (taken prisoner by the French) made so dashing an escape in 1865. A good gymnasium is among its arrangements. The city bristles with interesting churches (they pass forty) ; and its vast, severe cathedral* is famous even in Mexico. The ex-convent of Santa Rosa is particularly rich in the encaustic tiles in whose mak ing Puebla led the New World. Puebla is still, as it has been for centuries, one of the foremost manufacturing points of Mexico ; but * In one of its towers is the phonetic inscription : Reynando D. Carlos II. Nro. SeNor. El Maestro Mayor, Carlos Garcia Durango, Que enpeso la Fabryca de esta Tore y La acabo. ANo de 1678. Y no Sucedio Desgracya Costo. Syen Mil Pesos. [In the reign of Charles II., the Master-Builder Carlos Garcia Durango began the construction of this tower, and finished it in the year 1678. And no accident befell. It cost $100,000.] 138 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION now great modern mills are taking the place of fire side industries and colonial obrajes. In 1802 the city made five million pounds of soap. Even ten years earlier it had forty-six earthenware factories. At the beginning of this century it counted over one thou sand two hundred weavers of cotton and cottonades. It manufactured hats for Mexico and Peru. It also tanned over eighty thousand cowhides a year. Herds, by-the-way, were not slow to root and branch in the New World. Fray Jose de Acosta, whose Histdria Natural y Moral de las Indias is so flavorsome read ing, notes the arrival in Seville, as early as 1587, of a fiota bringing 64,340 Mexican rawhides — indicating a fair increase for about half a century since the first introduction of cattle to the New World. Now the city has fifteen modern cotton - mills, a glass factory, five or six flour-mills, and considerable industries in pottery and tiles, and onyx and the like. The great manufacturer, Rubin, has put over a thou sand tons of the latest machinery into his new million- dollar cotton-mill, La Moratilla ; and another two hun dred-loom mill near San Martin is but a year old. A two-hundred thousand-dollar mill, as new, faces the rail road station. A modern flour-mill, to do a business of over $200,000 a year, is another wrinkle of modernity. The city's factories have not begrimed its wonder ful skies nor debased its architecture. The stone cor nices of Puebla, and the stone brackets, which replace pillars as supports of its balconies, are unique. To the historian this town of eleven sieges, this promi nent point in colonial times,* and chief focus of the * It was the only reasonable city on the highway from the coast to the capital. l'oroi'A i Ki'i'. il I'll I -". SMOklMI Mot N IAIN ( l; Till' SM'UOMON 1 t I'F.I'.T II Hill) l-KOM SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES i;o War of Intervention, is precious. The ravine-gouged hill of Guadalupe has been the largest battle-ground in Mexican history, and on it Diaz won distinction in three battles against the invader. The splendid state- prison f.ve years old and costing $IOO.OOC>. the new alamedas and statues, the huge Parian .market', the improvements in the electric lighting and water-sup ply, the beginnings of sewerage, and the remodelling of the schools ^whlch a year ago adopted the German system) are typical of Pueb.as progress. So it is that the state paid on. on the national birthday September 16. 1S96 . the last instalment of its debt. It is one of the garden spots of all the Mexican up lands, this Faebla basin, staked at the corners by Popocatepetl. Yztacahuatl. and the Mali.nche. The average altitude of the plain is about seven thousand feet : and though scantily watered, its broad leagues are rich with maguey, corn, wheat, barley, beans, chile. and potatoes. That it was a favorite location of the first colonists is well known. When Fray Tor.bio de Paredes i^the historian Motollnia) blessed the six- mor.ths '-old town of Puebla. its huts, and church-site. Aoril 16. 155-. there were thirty-three citizens. In IC7S it had a population of tc.cce : and as late as iSco it was by site the fourth city in Spanish America. Since its early "boom" — probably the most remark able of those centuries — it has had its ups-and-dcvns : but nowadays it is marching forward surely and not slowly. On the other hand. Cholula. half an hour down the plain from this parvenu metropolis of only ;6c years. has swallowed so long a dose of civilization with hard ly the tremor of an eyelid. To this day it is Indian 140 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION as Indian, for all the latter landmarks. At the Con quest it was one of the largest pueblos in the country — about as large as Mexico itself — and among its low, flat houses towered the huge pyramids. Now it has but about 6000 people, with twenty-six churches, in cluding enormous San Francisco and its crumbled capilla real, whose dome is upheld by sixty- four col umns. Even upon the summit of its great pyramid stands the graceful church of Our Lady de los Remd- dios ; while a railroad has bitten deep into the base. This huge artificial mound, with a base now of about twenty acres, but formerly of sixty, and a present height of one hundred and seventy feet (formerly over two hundred) is one of the largest and one of the most ancient works of man in this old " New World," and, while it lacks the glamour of the " palaces " of Pa- lenque and Papantla and Tiahuanaco, is among the most interesting. It antedates even the Nahuatl occu pation, and was probably built by the Mayas, or the " Toltecs," those handy inventions of Ixtlilxochitl and Torquemada. Here was the famous so - called " Massacre of Cholula," when Cortez found himself toled -into the trap — and struck first. Bandelier first gave this much-abused affair its due proportion in his tory and in morals. ' Puebla was purposely built across the river from the tribal range of Cholula, and on vacant ground, " so as not to work injury to any Indians." The selection of a site which then cannot have looked quite so at tractive as the well- cultivated plain of Cholula, has been fully approved by time. Puebla is ideally situ ated. A city ought to thrive in such a setting — with the Atoyac to turn its mills, that climate to fill its KL SENOR DEL SACROMONTE, THE MOST FAMOUS IMAf.E IN MEXICO (1527) SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES 141 lungs, and for education of its eyes the two finest snow-peaks of North America beetling upon the west ern sky. Still, I care more for the Popoca-tepetl and the Yztaccihuatl from the other side — even so fair a valley as that of Puebla is not the fittest frame for a moun tain view. From the Sacromonte — whose gigantic cypresses, garlanded with Spanish moss, lead up to the cave-shrine of the most famous statue in Mexico* — is to me the most characteristic view of the Smoke Mountain, with head and shoulders above the summer clouds, and of the Woman in White stretched upon her lofty bier. Indeed, from just the right point of vantage, here is probably the noblest prospect in all North America. Below the shaggy hill by 350 feet — and against its abrupt toes — are the white buildings of Amecameca. Close beyond them begin the rapid but tresses of the range ; and above all impend the Titan pair. Popoca-tepetl (17,800 feet) is mightier and more burly than from the other side, and as for Yztac cihuatl (15,700 feet), her characteristic shape (here wonderfully like a woman's form covered with a white pall and stretched upon an altar) is wholly lost from the Puebla side, where she was known simply as Yztac-tepetl, the White Mountain. She is older, and has been far greater, than her royal lover ;f but now her crater has so much disappeared that careless trav ellers miss her volcanic character ; and from the waste of her stupendous frame are born the smiling valleys 1 * Our Lord of the Sacromonte, brought from Spain in 1 527. Enormous pilgrimages are made to it yearly; but it was never before photographed. t For so, by the Aztec myth, was Popoca-tepetl. 142 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION of Puebla. Popoca-tepetl, which has been numerously ascended ever since Diego de Ordaz (15 19),* has a crater half a mile in diameter, which is one of the most famous of sulphur mines. The volcano is alive, but inactive; but has not always been so tame within historic times. At the Conquest Cortez and others re cord that it was in eruption, throwing out rocks, smoke, and terrible noises. An outburst in 1540 car ried cinders as far as Puebla and Tlaxcala, and another in 1663 darkened the sky with its ashes. The last eruption was on the day of San Sebastian, 1664, when the eastern rim of the crater fell in, to the terror of all the country-side, and ashes fell again in Puebla, ten leagues away. Down from Puebla by the Mexican Southern, past the hamlet of Amozoc (famous by centuries for the expert smiths who waxed fat shoeing the pack-beasts that toiled up from Vera Cruz), one drops fast from the 7000-foot corn-lands to successive palms, bananas, and sugar-cane. It is another of those swift Mexican ladders from the high temperate zone to the tropics, and is interesting for memorable scenery as well as for the shifting panorama of climates. At Quidtepec we are less than 1800 feet above the sea. I cannot pretend to describe this dip into the rich south, nor Oaxaca, f capital of its state and mother of * Cortez discredits this achievement. It is perfectly certain, however, that in 1522 a gallant soldier named Francisco Mon tana was " lowered seventy or eighty fathoms, face down," and gathered sulphur for gunpowder to complete the Conquest. t It was this rich southern valley (the old " Huaxyacac " which he sent Juan Nufiez de Mercado to subdue in 1522) that IZTACCIHUATL, THE WOMAN IN WHITE — 15,705 FEET HIGH SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES 143 presidents — the low -built, massy city of the earth quake lands, with its pretty plazas and haciendas, its Oriental ox- carts, its gaslights and Arabic lanterns swung across the street, its baths trimmed with onyx, its fine public buildings, its museum, library, seminary, and normal schools. It is still one of the most Mexi can of cities, and one of the most attractive, with a climate hardly surpassed. It is gateway to a vast region just awakening for development, and to a great field of the first archseo- logic importance. A half -day's gallop away are the most surprising ruins north of Yucatan, the immemo rial so-called "mosaic palaces" of Mitla; and other pre-historic remains are in all directions. And on to the south open the wonders of the half-unguessed tierra caliente. But time fails me for longer rambling by these pleasant lanes north or south. It is too late to tarry in Guadalajara, which was already " Pearl of the West " before it was half so livable and lovable as now. It has not turned from the left-hand bank of the Santiago, nor forgotten its ancient and excelling potteries, its cathedral from 1548, its venerable wool gave Cortez his marquesate Del Valle, granted July, 1529. The diocese of Oaxaca (one of the four first in Mexico) was estab lished in 1534. The city has suffered various earthquakes (no tably in 1772, 1787, and 1817) and many stormings — by More los, Santa Anna, and Guerrero, not to mention Diaz himself and Field-marshal Bazaine in later wars. The town was found ed by royal cc'dida of April 25, 1 532. Fourteen years later it had but thirty Spaniards. Its present population is about 30,000. Its altitude is 3900 feet. 144 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION and cotton mills from 1765 (before that it depended for these fabrics on the older mills of Puebla, Quere taro, and San Miguel Grande). But on their head it has new beauties, new hygiene, and new conveniences. It is now lighted by electricity — the power transmitted from the great falls of Juanacatlan, fifteen miles away — and about it, now that a branch of the Mexican Cen tral brings it up to date, are springing up some of the finest factories in America. Pachuca (State of Hidalgo), the oldest mining camp in Mexico, is also one of the newest. I wonder what the Count of Regla would feel if he might return and visit the plant of the Regla Electric Power Transmission Company, a native company organized in 1894 with a capital of $800,000. From a fall of 90 feet it develops 600 horse-power, and transmits it ten kilometres. The mines of Pachuca suffer $250,000 a month by flooding — and by the jealousies which have kept them from pulling together to remedy the case ; but this cannot last long, and the electric company is to be their sav iour. Here were the famous mines of the Real del Monte, which probably enjoy the distinction of being the most colossal folly of English " tenderfeet," but paid as soon as they reverted to Mexican manage ment. Here were the famous vetas of La Viscaina, El Rosario, La Soledad, Cabrera, and Moran. Here the Conde de Regla " made his pile." It was from these tiros that he promised to pave the road from Vera Cruz to Mexico (550 kilometres) with silver ingots if the monarch would accept his invitation to visit the New World. Two of these mines in 1726-27 pro duced 4,341,600 ounces of silver. Here were two of the most disastrous shaft fires in early America ; and A BIT OF OLD MEXICO — THE RUINS OF MITLA SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES 145 here one of the first and greatest tunnels to drain a mine was finished in 1762. And there are Toluca — most often named in Mexi co for its superior brewery, but notable on many other planes of progress, besides its agricultural fertility — and handsome (if too Americanized) San Luis Potosi, with its two through railroads, its great and splendid ly equipped mining industries (including the greatest silver and lead reduction works in America, those of the Compaflia Metalurgica Mexicana), and its vantage- ground between the vegetable wealth of the tierra caliente and the mineral riches of the tierra fria. And there are modern and wakeful Monterey, and slower, but as sure, Durango* with its smelter, its iron mines, and its hopes of outlet to the West Coast. There is Morelia (once Valladolid de Michuacan, but renamed for the patriot priest Morelos), the home of such archi tecture as marks its Normal School, and of the first sweeping philanthropy in Mexico, as distinguished from the local philanthropies of school, hospital, etc. Here lived and toiled the- first bishop of Michuacan, Vasco de Quiroga, a forgotten man who did more for the Indians than that overrated and underbalanced Bartolome de las Casas, who stands with innocent Helps and his peers as about the sum and substance of Spanish mercy. As a matter of fact, it is only when we lay aside the crazy bishop of Chiapas that we can really comprehend the humanity of the Con quest and its sequel. Michuacan is a relatively small state, but a very rich one, ranging from the central * The old "Guadiana," founded 1559, under the second vice roy, Velasco el Primero, as a military outpost against the sav age tribes. 10 146 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION plateau down to Pacific tide -water; and with better transit will be a stalwart factor in national progress. In it is Pazcuaro, with one of the loveliest lakes in the world, and last abiding -place of the wonderful " feather -work " which once adorned priceless cloaks of Aztec chiefs, but is now known chiefly by cheap "pictures" in the curio stores. In 1829 the aborigi nal industry was already disappearing, and the Mexi can Congress voted $800 to one Jose Rodriguez, a remnant expert, for making the national coat-of-arms in this feather-work. Nor need the traveller slight Lerdo, in the famous Laguna cotton - belt ; and seductive Aguas Calientes, with its enormous new smelter; Celaya and San Juan del Rio ; Lagos, Saltillo, and -many more towns' of consideration, richly set. The Gulf coast has several potential harbors, but thus far only three competent ones. Tampico (Pueblo Viejo) was first visited by Grijalva in 15 18. The bar, with only five or six feet of water, denied even the petty vessels of the Conquest and kept the natural harbor unavailable. The present town was not found ed till April 12, 1823. Now the great improvements at the mouth of the Panuco (and its connection with the Mexican Central) guarantee, I should say, the pre eminence of Tampico over all other Gulf ports. Al ready the largest vessels can lay-to at the enormous wharf, and the day of the lighters is done. Here, by the way, was the legendary landing-place of the " Tol- tecs " when they invaded Mexico. Vera Cruz, where Cortez founded in 15 19 the first town on the American continent — La Villa Rica de SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES 147 Vera Cruz — has always been the chief outlet of Mexi co, despite the wretchedness of its harbor. The mod ern works there are at last making safe the most his toric port of the New World. There are hasty travel lers fearful of its climate (and not unreasonably) who see in it only a landing-place to be got away from cuanto dates mcjor. But Vera Cruz is deeply pictu resque, with its lighter architecture still Moresque, its types, its playas, and its coral fortress of San Juan de Ulua (a corruption of the Indian Acolhud). The for tifications of this port cost fifty millions in the old days — -and never kept any foe out. The tributary country is of marvellous variety, even for Mexico; and its best has almost infinite fertility. Perhaps nowhere else can one see so diagrammatically as on the road from Vera Cruz to Mexico the range of what Hum boldt so aptly calls " climates in strata "¦ — that won derful Mexican range where in the same latitude flourish the apple and the banana, wheat and the sugar-cane, the oak and pine and palm. Here is the home of the vanilla ; and that less agreeable flavor which has given its name to Jalapa. a poblacion perhaps as pretty as any inland town on earth. There are no better cottons, tobaccos, cacaos, and sarsaparillas than those of the state of Vera Cruz ; and its cane sur passes that of Santo Domingo. From tide-water to the highest peak in North America (Orizaba, known to the Aztecs as Citlal-tepetl, the star-mountain, 18,200 feet *¦) is the gamut of Vera Cruz. The porphyry peak of the Cofre del Perote (Nauhcampa-tepetl), in * Raised to its supremacy by the more precise orometries of this decade. 148 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION its pumice overcoat (13,400 feet), and the bold 13,470- foot "Malinche,"* are other splendid landmarks of the region. The town of Orizaba (a corruption of the Nahuatl "ahuilizapan") is only 4000 feet in altitude and only twenty-five miles from its namesake peak. It is one of the most picturesque of Mexican towns, and, with its huge cotton-mills and other factories, one of the most promising. Coatzacoalcos (which Humboldt appraised as " the best natural harbor of any river that enters the gulf") is of unique importance, not so much for the great commerce of parts of Tabasco, Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Vera Cruz, to meet which the present large improve ments are fitting it, as for its geographic position. It is key to the narrowest of all the Mexican isthmus, where the two oceans are not over 130 miles apart in a bee-line, the shortest cut there is till you go as far south as Nicaragua. However neglected by provin cial politicians, however discredited by due suspicion of the promoters of impossible fakes, the destiny of interoceanic communication is manifest and inevita ble. I believe the Panama canal will never be built — that by sane business-men it never can be. The Nica ragua or the Tehuantepec route — or maybe both — in evitably will be. Already by 1520, Cortez, in his fourth Letter to the Emperor, foreshadows the great work we have been too dull to do yet, and speaks of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as el secreto del estrech — the secret of the strait. And the viceroy, Conde de Re- villagigedo (1789), projected a transisthmian canal via * A corruption of Marina, the name of Cortez's Indian sweet heart, with the diminutive "tzin"; the aboriginal title of the peak was Matlal-cueitl. SOME OUTER ACTIVITIES 149 the river Coatzacoalcos. Apart from its effect upon the rest of the world, commercially — and for the United States, of course, no other one enterprise could mean so much as such extraneous bond be tween the halves of a nation now sundered by the "long haul" of desert railroads — some such cheap interoceanic highway is a near necessity to Mexico. Not for present commerce alone, but to exploit the incalculably rich but now difficult south, to open its rubber, sugar, and precious woods to the world, Mexi co must have it. And it would be somewhat a joke (nor is it an impossible one) if Mexico were to do the work. Balanced, as it were, between the two oceans, compact and central with regard to the long commerce of the world, it is hard to foretell what influence upon trade and politics the new republic might have, with this canal in her hands. XIII GLIMPSES OF THE WEST COAST Mazatlan from seaward is a picture not readily forgotten, but never yet adequately photographed. Its turquoise semilune of a bay, symmetrically set be tween three precipitous islands to the north and three to the south, washes the very hem of the town, whose adobes turn to marble with distance and the sun. On the northern outer island — once refuge of wholesale cimarrones (runaway slaves) — perches the light-house, perhaps 300 feet above the tide. It poses at home as the highest faro in the world. As a matter of fact, that of San Lorenzo, in front of Callao, is more than thrice as high. This outpost of the tropics — six leagues south of the Tropic of Cancer, and already in sight of the Southern Cross — is now the (commercially) first port on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and until very recently was surpassed only by Vera Cruz. Now Tampico and Coatzacoalcos will far outstrip it, and it will not come back to its own until one of the transcontinental lines creeps down to it. From the seaman's point of view it is a poor harbor — in fact, it is no harbor at all, but merely a good roadstead. Vessels of 1 8-f eet draught anchor a mile and a half from the wharf, and further familiarity must be GLIMPSES OF THE WEST COAST 151 left to the lighters. But politically and geographical ly it is a very important point. It is key to the Gulf of California — or Gulf of Cortez, for its discoverer ; or Mar Bermejo, for the tingeing of its waters by ferrugi nous streams — and is, so to say, the midway port of the Mexican West. Up the gulf are the good harbors of Guaymas (reached by the Sonora railroad * from Arizona) and of Topolobampo, destined to be the ter minus of another line from the " States." Down the coast are the magnificent natural harbors of Manza- nillo and Acapulco, besides various embarcaderos of less future. Mazatlan has possibly 12,000 souls, and its manu factures are minor; but it commands a vast interior of rich potentiality. It was formerly port not only for Sinaloa, but as well for Sonora, Chihuahua, Du rango, and so far inland as Zacatecas. The opening of ports at San Bias and Manzanillo cut it down at home, and our San Francisco has put a knee in its old-time China trade; that commerce goes now to California first, and is thence parcelled out to Maz atlan. Its coast trade is still important, and the prospects more so. It is the commercial centre of rich mining districts, and gold and silver bullion form the great ma jority of its exports. The famous mines of the Real del Rosario, twenty-seven leagues inland, were discov ered in 1655, and are still profitably worked by new comers. This spring of many fortunes takes its name * Recently acquired by the Southern Pacific from the Atchi son in exchange for the California line between Needles and Mojave. This was, perhaps, the first time in history that rail roads were ever " swapped." 152 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION from the curious chance of its finding. One Leon Ro- jas, a countryman, was " running " a belated steer when his rosary broke. Piously unwilling to lose the scat tered beads, he dismounted — but could not find them in the dusk. Being a person of tenacity, he passed the night there ; and in the morning found not only his beads, but a film of silver which his camp-fire had roasted from the virgin soil. The state has a mint in Culiacan, established in 1846; and the mines have yielded bullion for all necessities of the coinage, and several yearly millions for export besides. Cattle come next to mining. The interior, too wooded for sheep, is admirably adapted to horses and horned herds, which are in abundance. The pelts of these and of alligators (which swarm in the coast streams) are a staple of export ; and the home tanneries also handle the skins of the beautiful felidae of- the moun tains — the jaguar, the cougar, and the ocelot. Agri culture, due to be chief of Sinaloan industries, is thus far the least advanced. There are no important irri gating canals, and the whole productive state is in but the doorway of development. Corn leads, and is the staple of the natives ; with that universal Span ish credo, the frijol, a good second. Wheat is com paratively little sown as yet, and the grape is rare. Of the abundant fruits, the orange, cocoanut, and plantain are most prodigal; and the agreeable pitihaya — fruit of the organ cactus — grows riot, a " board by the month " for the peasantry and an article of export inland. It even christened the state — Sinaloa, or sinaloaha, being the Cahiti name for this fruit. The once-famous pearl fisheries of the West Coast, from which in 1587 no less than 632 pounds of pearls IN A CIGARETTE FACTORY, MAZATLAN GLIMPSES OF THE WEST COAST 1 53 were taken to Seville,* are nowadays neglected — not that they are " played out," but because other indus tries have for the time crowded them aside. For a town founded in 1822 with a few huts, Maz atlan has had its fair taste of history. It has changed its name thrice, beginning as Ortigosa, rising to Villa de las Costillas, and finally adopting its present name from the Aztec — mazatl, deer; tlan, place. It has been several times the capital of Sinaloa, and all times a nest of revolution. It became a garrison town in 1844, and lost no time in rebelling against Santa Anna. In 1846 it hatched another revolt. We block aded and finally captured it in 1847. Mexican revo lutionists took it by storm in 1859. 1° tne sacrifice of Maximilian it figured again, being the only foot hold in Sinaloa of the meddlers. The French cor vette Cordelier e bombarded it in 1864, but was driven off by one agile cannon in the plaza. Seven months later a French naval division captured the town after a bombardment, and it was Maximilian's for two years to a day — when General Corona recaptured it and put an end to intervention in Sinaloa. In 1868 Maz atlan was again the seat of a revolt against the gov ernment, and for three years was infested with troub les. In 1 871 it rose again, and was taken by storm in the following year — only to erupt once more in 1876. The list of governors of Sinaloa since the state was founded (1830) is of more length than breadth — with its incumbents " for ten days," " for two days," " for seven days." Mazatlan is characteristically ear - marked — flat- * Father Acosta, Book IV., Chapter XV. 154 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION topped, practically one-storied, and compact ; cleaned to the ultimate crumb by its double health - depart ment, the vultures and the donkey-carts of the munic ipality (and thereby more scrupulously neat than any city of ours); its fresh, light walls sharp in the rilievo of their shade-trap angles (there are no other shadows like those of the adobe) and the still darker plumes of palm and plantain in court-yard and garden ; its nar row streets, painfully but durably empedradas with cobble-stones from the beach, deserted on the side of the sun, alive but leisurely on the side of the shade ; its picturesque folk, and over all and around all the indescribable atmosphere of New Spain, with all its courtesy, its content, its restfulness. We saunter up from the wharf along the excellent stone mole; past a very respectable iron-foundry, a good tannery, the gas-works, a one-mule horse-car going in our direction, and humble match and cigarette fac tories uncounted ; through irresolute streets which finally decide upon the plaza — one triangle of tropic bloom — and on to the ship-yard, author of the excel lent launches which surprise the traveller at the steam er. The few principal streets are modest but pleas ant, with their stringent neatness and their glimpses by cool doorways to -wide patios. The Spanish-Ameri can idea of a dwelling is not met by a box, of what soever size and sumptuousness. It must be a home not only for the family, but for a bit of out-doors as well. Instead of making a lawn to dazzle the passer and be lost to the dweller, the transplanted Iberian still takes his lawn into the sitting-room. He builds not behind it, but around it ; and every room opens into it, and every inmate can lounge in its freshness "V CHOLOS OF THE WEST COAST GLIMPSES OF THE WEST COAST 155 secure from unentitled eyes. Its fountain, its foliage, its cool verandas, are part of the home and not of the street. Back of these homelike homes, in little tilted alleys, are the chosas of the poor — boatmen, laborers, porters, fishers — rude apologies to a complacent sky, with care less cane and rushes, and naked babes and laughter, and all the trade-marks of the tropics, where to be poor is not to want. Aside from the few foreigners, there are four distinct classes in Mazatlan — the Cre oles, mestizos, mulattoes, and Indians. Five aboriginal tongues — each with two to four dialects — are still spoken in Sinaloa, and representatives of all may be encountered in the port. Despite its cleanliness, Maz atlan is liable at certain periods to malarial fevers, dysenteries, and the like; while a little northward the country is notably healthful. Almost without ex ception, the direct coast of Mexico, on Gulf or Pacific, is not salubrious to be lived on. The roadstead of San Bias distends an arc of low, dense, tropical shore. There are better harbors, and worse. The town, half a mile from the curved beach, where the lighters land by a caiman-infested estuary, has two thousand souls — and the content of a half-mill ion. It is almost undiluted tropics. Apart from the modest plaza — with its small adobe church, its adobe post-office glassy and brassy with Yale lock- boxes, and two other adobe streets — everything is of cane and palmetto. The chief industry — if so harsh a word may be applied to work without worry (which is play) — is the making of cigars and cigarettes. Both are of an excellence and cheapness calculated to make the 156 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION wanderer smoke and think — the latter particularly if he has been accustomed to being fined at home for smoking decently. This is outlet for the Tepic tobac co-belt ; not the best in Mexico, but withal one whose best product the connoisseur is very glad to puff. But now a railroad has its nose turned to San Bias from the central plateau. When that reaches salt-water there will be another story from this present sleeper. Perhaps it is its exquisite proportion which gives to Manzanillo the air of a toy harbor ; for it is large enough for a navy, and for security has but two equals on the west coast of the United States. An arm of hills hugs the blue bay, whose waters are deep er than is usual. on Pacific shores and more beautiful than almost any others in the world. The big steam er floats in a perfect aquarium, whose very pebbles are visible as the innumerable rallies of sharks, fifty- pound gold-fish (the pargo or " red -snapper"), and a hundred other finny shapes. It is a vision the most hardened globe-trotter will never forget. Manzanillo is a perfect jewel of the tropics — with one sole exception the loveliest coast-picture between California and Chile. Snuggled along the base of its abrupt and matted hills behind, its front is bent to the exquisite curve of beach. The chalky adobe houses, peaked with red tiles ; the streets spotless as after the besom of a New England housewife, and " enstoned " (by the Spanish of it) in wonderful pat terns of cobble ; the plaza, one great blossom ; the massy little church uplifted like a benediction upon the town ; an air which seems distilled of butterflies and birds and flowers, a sky like California and a bay PLAZA AND CATHEDRAL, ACAPULCO GLIMPSES OF THE WEST COAST 1 57 like Italy for blue — it is all a canvas few lands can match. If Manzanillo has but a thousand souls, its impor tance is commensurate rather with its beauty than its population. It is a real port, well sheltered and well fathomed ; and from tide-water a railroad is already so far inland as Colima (capital of the state of the same name), its ninety-six kilometres insuring the projected rail connection with the interior. Acapulco, the most beautiful Pacific port in the Americas, is also the second finest harbor in the world, Sydney alone outranking it — no better sheltered but far larger. My conviction is that it is destined to be one of the largest assets of modern Mexico. All it needs is a railroad to the capital — and that is creeping rapidly towards Acapulco. Here for centuries came the Manila galleon. Here the copper of Coquimbo, the silks of Canton, and the chocolate-nuts of Guaya quil were beached to begin their overland journey, pickaback by mule, to Spain and way-stations. Over that historic pack-trail is one of the most picturesque and fascinating paseos, by horse or mule, that man can make in any land — though I have known tourists who saw nothing of it but the holes in the path. The coast all along here is of cliffs wading into the very sea. The steamer seems almost to split them, so unforeseen is the cleft. Into a blue channel, bluff- walled, it turns, to the right of the rocky isle of La Roqueta (captured by the meteoric Galeana in the War of Independence), and steers straight upon the inland ridges. But timely before them another sudden channel opens to the left, and rounding its elbow the 158 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION vessel steams up the bay and anchors in gunshot of the town. It is the very foot of a stocking — the ankle to sea, the instep shoreward, the anchorage in the toe. The hills which hedge it from the sea are bold and high ; and to get air to breathe in town the extreme western cerro had to be beheaded. It is all the picture of a dream. The soft green of the bay — to which not even the Pacific ground-swell can enter — is cut by the sombre green of beachless hills which mock so impotent a word as " wooded." They are woolled, with a dark mat which seems rather carved than grown, so unyielding is it. At the water's edge, here and there, rise the high plumed heads of palms, with glimpses of plantations between their col onnades. On a long, narrow strand of the northern shore are strung the irregular white beads of the town, ended at the left by the truncate hill, at the right by the gray old fort. Than Acapulco there is no better type of the Mexi can tierra caliente. It is the jewel of all tropic Ameri ca ; artistically it has no superior in any land, and in this hemisphere no equal. Its history goes back to 1531, when Cortez himself discovered the harbor. From this point he sent out the ill-starred expedition which found Sinaloa — and per ished there.* The town has about 6000 people, and is compact and bright ; but when Mr. Hampson's road from "the city" gets here (which will be soon), Acapulco will come to its own. Just now it is more Mexican (and therefore more artistic) than any of the Gulf * From Acapulco, also, Hernando de Alarcon, the first dis coverer of our California (via the Colorado river), sailed May 9, 1540. He was sent by Viceroy Mendoza. 1 "".'I Jlll.l, O.I. ,|.'i:.|M.|s .'111. |. GLIMPSES OF THE WEST COAST 1 59 ports, as it is also far less known. The alluring old plaza, with the quaint bulk of the church behind, and at one side the stalls and tatters of an unspoiled Mexi can market-place, and the buildings standing up to a second story — these are good, but better is beyond. I suppose man has never known a more perfect stroll than that by moonlight from the plaza to the fort. Away from the more crowded centre, up a slop ing street of ancient paving, half tunnel-like under gi gantic amates, whose ten-foot trunks stand on clumsy tiptoe of arched roots; with furtive loopholes be tween these and the high - thatched cabins to the moonlit bay; and under the ponderous bastions which laughed at Morelos, but opened to the first knock of Maximilian — it is all a memory which half comes to be mistrusted. It seems too perfect to have been true — such more than moonlight, such angles of shade, such salients of whiteness, such consenting of all Nat ure in one picture unforgettable a lifetime. I had thought to lose the gloss from the wings of this tropic butterfly with the fourth catching ; but the more I see Acapulco the more it impresses me as the most per fect composition in all the galleries of the New World. As for material prospects, there is no doubt that it will be the port of Mexico on the Pacific, and chief point of commerce in three thousand miles of coast-line. XIV BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY There are no more interesting nomads than words ; no others which can so go gypsying to the ends of the earth and homestead there — yet still retain residence in their birthplace. And among these wanderers from mouth to mouth, that outlast time and laugh at space, no others have quite such romance to us as those we have adopted from Spanish America. We have never borrowed as many words from any other contemporary language — except French, so much more intimate neighbor of our ancestors. Nor have any others stood quite so intimately linked with the beginnings and most picturesque phases of our own national life. It is astonishing what a successful invasion of Eng lish has been made by the sons of those who failed with the Armada. With the ebb and flow of frontiers, the innumerable driftwood of the Castilian tongue has lodged here, there, everywhere. And where it once came it was never forgotten. The Iberian had an almost matchless aptitude at nomenclature — an ear not only for music of the tongue, but for harmony of meaning, both of which are rather lost on a race of Smithvillains and Jonesburrowers. He rather overdid the saint business, perhaps — though saints may be as THE OLD FORT, ACAPULCO BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY l6l good godfathers as are crossroads autocrats. But aside from that, his names were all melodious and the rest of them almost invariably appropriate. For the one reason or the other, they have stuck like burrs. Two-thirds of the geographical names in the New World to-day are of Spanish derivation ; and the same linguistic tracks are abundant in every other walk of American life. This swart name-putter has penetrated ubiquitously and intimately the speech of his tradi tional foe. You will hardly turn a corner in our dic tionaries without running up against him. Nothing but words — yet it gives one a little thrill to find all across the deserts where they left their bones, in every nook of the unforeseen empires that have grown upon their dust, these unobliterated footprints of the pioneers. If any word might off-hand be taken for straight English — and Cockney at that — " Piccadilly " might. But "Piccadilly" is no Londoner, nor even a Saxon. It came straight from Spain and the Spanish parti ciple picado long ago — when a picadillo (little pierced) collar had a very different style from the now prover bial one. And what word could be more flavorsome of our South "befo' de wall" than "pickaninny"? But it is not. a native of our cotton-belt — it came from Cuba, where it was piquinini, and its parents were the Span ish pequeiio nino (little child). Our very word " ne gro " is a direct transfer from the Spanish negro (nay- gro), black, and that other commonest nickname, "Sambo," is from the Castilian zambo (bow-legged), a mote invented for the "African before there was an English-speaking person in all the New World. " Mu- 1 62 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION latto," "quadroon" (quarterdn), and the like, are of the same parentage. You will hardly pick from the New York gutter a more typical gamin word than " Dago " ; but here again the street-Arab is debtor to the true Arab heir, for " Dago " is only an ignorant corruption of the Spanish patron saint Diego (dee-ay-go), James. The New England housewife could not make pump kin pie without a " colander " (which she calls " cul- linder"), that useful strainer whose holes and name were invented long before Plymouth Rock — the Span ish colador. And, so far as that goes, what Yankee boy stowing away some of grandma's cookies, with joyous munching of the little brown seeds, dreams that " caraway " originated not among the Granite Hills, but in Spain, whose alcarahueya came still earlier from the Moors? Even the "cloves" in the sweet pickle are only Spanish "nails" (clavos); and the old farmer's "almanac" gets its name from Arabia through Spain. The " calabash," which once made water from the old well taste sweeter than water will ever taste again, is an other loan of Spain, its derivation being from calabaza, a gourd. But it has lost its prettiest romance — in all Spanish America the gift of las calabazas was equiva lent to " the mitten." The vagrant clapped into the "calaboose" still finds the connection — for it was origi nally calabozo. The merchant prince would hardly be an heir-apparent were there no such thing as " cotton " — and that gets its name from coton, and that is from algodon, with its Moorish earmark. " Cottonade," even, is from cotonada. " Palaver " was a politer term before its corruption BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY 1 63 from palabra, word ; and " savvy " did not smack of slang when it was plain saber, to know. A " pecca dillo " is unchanged in form and meaning, a little sin, the diminutive oi pecado. The Kentucky " duel " had its precedent and name from the Spanish duelo ; and Mosby was not the first " guerrilla " — a little war, diminutive of guerra. New Orleans may not care a " picayune," but that proverbial coin is another Span ish tag — and so were those unforgotten pieces of our childhood, the " pistareen," " doubloon " and " real." Indeed, the " bit," " two-bits," " four-bits," etc., which so perplex the tourist in the West, are derived from Spanish standards, though they have lost their Span ish name ; and so is our Almighty " Dollar." The doctor could not afford to lose a great many adopted Spaniards from his lexicon — particularly "quinine" and "cocaine." Quinine (Spanish quind) was discovered by the Countess of Chinchon, then vice-queen of Peru, in 1631. "Cocaine" is the active principle of coca, that marvellous plant of the Andes which is almost board and lodging to the Serrano Ind ians of Peru and Bolivia, and has been held sacred by them from time immemorial. They call it by its Quichua name, cuca, whence the Spanish coca, which we have adopted. Jalap comes from Jalapa, in Vera Cruz, and sarsaparilla is another debt to Spanish Amer ica in name and fact. It is fascinating to trail some of these word-wander ings. Four hundred and five years ago Columbus picked up a little word in the Antilles, and put it in the mouth of Europe ; and to-day an American summer would be lonely without it. It was an Indian word which the Spaniards represented byhamaca (ah-mah-ca) 164 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION and which we call "hammock." The word " Indian " itself (in the sense of American aborigine) dates from the same time, when the world took Columbus's dis covery to be part of India, and called it laslndias, and the inhabitants Indios. The proper name of the American lion to-day is " puma" — and that is an Inca word that Pizarro found in the Fifteen-thirties among the Andes. The animal has a range 5000 miles long ; but its Peruvian name came up to the Isthmus, took root in Mexico, entered Arizona and New Mexico with Coronado himself in 1540, and by now is accepted not only in all Spanish countries, but wherever English is spoken. "Cougar," the next best single name for the animal, is from the cuguacuari of a tribe in Brazil. " Condor " has a sim ilar history. It is the Inca word cuntur (from cuno- t'uri, snow-biter) done into Spanish and broadcasted over the world. " Cuye " or " cue," the proper name of the miscalled guinea-pig, is another Peruvian word. "Jaguar," the American tiger, wa.sjaguara (ha-gwah- ra) among the Indians of Brazil. The " manatee," or river-cow, is from manati, the Spanish form of another Brazilian word; "macaw" is from macao ; and "mar- gay," one of the most beautiful of the tiger-cats, is one more Spanish importation from the Amazon. The great est of snakes, the " boa," was named by the Indians of the Antilles. "Coati" (a species of monkey) and " tapir " (Spanish tapiro) are also from South America. " Chinchilla " is a pure Spanish name for the fine-furred little beast the explorers of Peru first made known to the world ; and the like is true of " armadillo " (the lit tle armored creature ; from armado). " Vicufia " (vee- cdon-ya) is the record of a curious misunderstanding. BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY 165 The Aymara name of this most beautifully furred ani mal is huari ; but the infinitive of their verb which means to cry like a huari is hui-cuiia. Probably the first Spaniards who heard that strange sound asked, "What is that?" and mistook the answer, " It bleats," for the name of the animal. There — is a whole lesson in etymology. A similar blunder is probably responsible for the name of the vicufia's bigger cousin, the llama. The Aymara name of it is cdr-hua ; but we may guess that the conquistador s question, " Como se llama?" ("What is it called ?") was merely echoed by the Indian, who did not understand a word of this new tongue. " Llama ?" he repeated — and llama it has been ever since. A great many words get into the dictionaries no more wisely. It is said that "kangaroo" — which is no Australian name of the beast — arose thus: one of the earliest English visitors had killed a marsupial and asked a native, " What do you call this ?" The native answered, " Kan-gW-ru " — " I do not understand." The four most curious animals in the New World are the little camels of the Andes— the llama (l'yah- ma), vicufia, huanaco, and alpaca. The latter name — familiar to every woman, though few that speak Eng lish ever wore a thread of genuine alpaca — is a cor ruption of the Inca word pacliu, with the Moorish- Spanish prefix al. There is a whole vocabulary of native American words, in scores of different tongues and all the way from Colorado to Patagonia, which we have adopted into " United States" solely from the Spanish version of them. Some of the most interesting are from that remarkable federation of tribes which controlled the 1 66 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION " Lake " of Mexico and its environs. " Coyote " * is Spanish, from the Aztec coyotl. " Ocelot," the Mexi can tiger-cat, is another Aztec word, originally ocelotl. So is " chinchonte," the nickname of the mocking bird, which was first discovered by the conquistadores. Its Nahuatl name was cencontl. Likewise "tecolote" (from tecolotl), the widespread name of our little prai rie owl. Even " tomato " is from the range of Mon tezuma, by name and by nativity. It is merely the Aztec word tomatl.f " Cayman," the proper name of the alligator, is the Spanish form of the Carib name. " Alligator," by the way, is a very funny and very typi cal instance of the way new words come. It is a cor ruption of the Spanish el lagarto (the lizard). Indeed, the unlettered frontiersman adds more to our dictiona ries than does the student. A similar case is that of " lariat " — which is as near as an ignorant cow-boy came to the Spanish la reata. " Lasso " is a like blunder for the Spanish lazo, a noose. " Canoe " is canoa, a word the conquistadores picked up in Hayti ; as they did " guano " (Quichua huanu) in Peru. "Jerky," or "jerked meat," is another Spanish find, in fact and name — the latter coming from the Aymara (Bolivia) charqui. " Chocolate " (choco-ldh-te) the con quistadores gave us from the Lake of Mexico. Its derivation is from the Aztec words, choco [cacao, the proper name for the chocolate nut) and latl (water). "Cocoa" also comes from cacao. "Potato" is from * Co-y6-te. t Etymologically, therefore, the pronunciation " tomayto " is impossible. BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY 1 67 patata, the name given by the Spaniards to that now universal tuber which they discovered in Ecuador a generation before Sir Walter Raleigh was born. Even more important, they were the first Europeans to dis cover what we call corn (in Europe " corn " without the prefix " Indian " means wheat, barley, oats, etc.) ; and the proper name, "maize," comes from mahiz, a word they learned, with the grain, from one of the tribes of the West Indies. These words, which we have more or less uncon sciously derived from the Castilian finder and founder of the New World, crop out even in such unexpected places as our colonial history. There would have been no " grenadiers " at Bunker Hill except for Spain, since the hand-grenade and the grenadier both get their name from the city of Granada. There seems an equal incongruity in the name of the " Greenhorn " mountains in Colorado. They were not named for the " tenderfoot," but a century before his day were christened cuerno verde, green horn, for a famous Co manche chief of the time. For that matter, Colorado (the red), Texas (the tiles), Nevada (the snowy), Flor ida (the flowery, the Spanish word being sounded flo- ree-da), Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were all named by the Spanish long before any Eng lish-speaking person ever heard of them. So was Lab rador (the laborer). One of the queerest of these linguistic orphans is the English "cordwain," which does not look much like its own father. It is from " cordovan " (leather) — for through centuries the Spanish city of Cordoba made the best leather in Europe. Other animal names we get from the Spanish pio- 1 68 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION neers are " peccary," a South American Indian word for the fierce little wild hog which used to range from New Mexico and Texas to Chile (it is also called " javeli,"* another Indian word through the Spanish); " parroquet"; "burro" (from Spain); "iguana" (from Hayti) ; " toucan " (from Brazil). " Jigger," or " chigo," the terrible tiny parasite which burrows into the flesh of the feet, and often causes loss of limb or life, gets its name from the Spanish chigre (chee-greh). " Ci marron," the mountain sheep, is a Spanish word which means " wild," and is also the original of our " maroon" as applied to runaway slaves. " Mustang " is a border corruption of mesteiio ; and "bronco" (which ignorant people still persist in spelling broncho) is a pure Span ish word for an unbroken horse. It is bron-ko, not bron-cho ; and ch in Spanish has invariably the sound we give ch in " church." Some people seem to fancy that " bronco " is Greek, and some relation to " bron chitis." Among fruits whose use and names we learned from our Spanish predecessors are our California pride, the " apricot " (Spanish albricoque, from the Moors) ; the "banana," " granadilla," "guava," "chirimoya," "piti- haya," and "pomelo"; the pecan nut and the pifion (peen-ydhn). The mahogany-tree (Brazilian mahogani) or caoba, the palmetto, yucca, mesquite, maguey, and many more, remind us of our further debt in trees. Indigo and aniline dyes are also derived from the Spanish. So are cochineal (cochinilla) and caout chouc (cahuchu). Guaco is a common and beauti ful weed from which Waco, Texas, gets its name ; * Ha-ve-lee. BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY 1 69 and "canaigre" is another, less handsome but more useful. Alfalfa, the king of all forage plants, came first from Spain to Peru ; thence to Mexico and up here — and its name still testifies to its Moorish lineage. Our muti nous wild " alfileree " gets its name from some unlet tered granger's attempt upon the Spanish alfilerillo (al-feel-a-reel-yo). Any one who will once notice its seed-vesicles will understand the aptness of its name, which comes from alfiler, a pin. The feminine form is a blunder of our dictionaries. The Spanish Californians call it always alfilerillo, and no one, despite the dic tionaries, ever calls it alfilaril-la. " Alcove" is from Spanish alcoba — and back of that, of course, from the Arabic. " Corridor " is Spanish, and so is "Mosque." "Adobe," "patio," "plaza," "pue blo," "presidio," "azotea" (the flat promenade roof), and " jacal " (hack-al, house of palisade chinked with adobe) are all Spanish unchanged in form, though fre quently enough butchered in pronunciation. The sailor's " capstan " is of Spanish invention and christening (cabestran, rope-winder). " Filibuster " is from filibustero ; and " caravel," " flotilla," " armada," and "galleon" are as recognizable to any intelligent reader as to the mariner. "Mariner" itself, by the way, is of the same nationality (marinero). " Renegade " (renegado) and " Creole " (criollo, prop erly used only of the children born in America of Spanish or French parents, and pure blooded) are familiar words to every one, as " mestizo " (mixed breed) and " cholo " (cross of European with Indian) are to the scientist. " Coyote " is also used by 100,- 000 citizens of the United States (though the dictiona- 170 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION ries wot not of it) in a secondary sense to mean a half- breed. " Grandee " and " don " need no introduction ; but ev ery one may not remember that even our English " ad mirals " were beholden to Spain for their title, which still further back was derived from the Arabic amir-al- bahr, " commander of the sea." Then there is "hidal go," that true aristocrat of a word, hijo de algo — "son of somebody as is something." Miners would be rather lost without " el dorado " (" the gilded " cacique of the Colombian plateau), and " bonanza," and " placer," and many other words we have inherited from the first American Argonauts. And the very " frontier" they love is only the Span ish frontera. Our Castile soap, and Lima (Peru) beans ; our sherry (Xeres), port (Oporto), Manzanilla, Madeira, Canary, and Amontillado wines are not much " masqueraded " (another Spanish word) ; but it is not so easy to recog nize, in the " sirroons " so familiar to the indigo trade, the original zurrones. " Filigree " is a bit wide from filigrana; and the German " canaster," tobacco, seems to have wandered far from the Spanish canastra, bas ket. The peanut is quite unrecognizable; but it was discovered by the Spanish, and is still called in South America mant (its Qufchua name), and on this conti nent cacahuate, a corrupted Aztec word. In its old home it had a dignity we do not give it, being con verted into flour as well as into the delicious drink chicha ; and I have exhumed it, unharmed, in the laps of Peruvian mummies of great antiquity. The geographer has to deal not only with tens of thou sands of Spanish proper names, but with a great many BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY 171 generic ones as well. " Savannah " (from sdbana, a sheet), " sierra," " cordillera," " cafion " (canydhn, literal ly a cannon or gun-barrel) ; " cafiada " (can-yah-da, a nar row valley, but not cliff-walled like a cafion) ; " mesa " (may-sa), a table-land ; " pampa " (from the Quichua bambd), one of the lofty plains of South America; " ar- royo"(a ravine); " key " (like the Florida Keys, de rived from cayo); " lagoon " (from lagund); " barranca," a bluff; " llano " (lyah-no, a desert plain) ; " cienega " (see-en-nay-gah, a wet meadow) — these are a few of the Spanish words he must have at his tongue's end. As for the naturalist, he needs a vocabulary of several thousand Spanish words — mostly adapted from the Indian — to cover the fauna of the Americas ; and the botanist about as many more for the flora. The eth nologist is similarly indebted for the great majority of his Indian tribe-names. Apache, Comanche, Pueblo, Navajo, Yuma, Papago, Ute, Mescalero, and hundreds of others are direct from the Spanish. Many Spanish words or Spanish derivations from Indian tongues have become current with ethnologists and well-read people the world over. Such are cacique (ca-see-ke), a word which originated in Santo Domingo, and became naturalized in every tribe of Indians be tween Colorado and Bolivia; estufa, Spanish for stove, but now universally adapted for the sacred man-house of the aborigine ; cachina, one special dance of one special tribe, now generally applied to all Indian cere monial dances ; temescal, the Aztec medicinal sweat- house or primitive Turkish bath — and many more. Equally familiar are " siesta " (shortened from sesta hora, the sixth hour, noon), the mid-day rest ; " man tilla " and " rebozo," head draperies ; " poncho," that 172 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION blessed South American invention of a blanket with a hole in the centre for the head, a pattern followed in all Navajo blankets of the very highest order; "zarape" (frequently blundered into " serape ") ; the charming dances of the " fandango," " bolero," " cachuca," " chi- ca," and the like. The familiar "chinch-bug" is merely a descendant of the Spanish chinche ; and the " New Jersey Eagle" is of clean Spanish blood — mosquito, "a little fly," diminutive of mosca. Among epicures the " pompano," " bonito," " barracuda," are sample reminders that the Spaniards also knew a good fish when they saw it. " Tapioca " is from the Brazilian tipioca; and " cas sava," its source, is an unchanged Spanish word. " Manioc " is similarly descended. Even " coffee " — Heaven's next-last, next-best gift to man — is from cafd, and that from the Arabic qahwe. Of other Spanish kitchen names, well known in the West, may be men tioned chile (the red pepper), tamale, frijoles (the pre cious brown beans), atole (a most nourishing gruel of pop - corn meal), tortilla (the unleavened bread), and so on. The missionary about to tempt the South Sea Isl anders might perhaps be comforted to remember that " cannibals " are nothing worse than a corruption of the Spanish Caribes (cah-ree-bes) or Caribs. The spinster owes both her canary and its name (if she will trace the debt back) to the Spaniards — though with them candrio is now hardly so fond a term as she might expect. As for her " porcelain," that comes the same way, its original being porcelana, which in turn is from puerco (pig) — the porcelain shell having a shape-resemblance to a porker's back. THE RUBRICA OF SPAIN BORROWED FROM THE ENEMY 1 73 " Acequia " (ah-say-kee-a), the irrigating ditch which is the life of the Southwest, is Spanish by name and custom. " Ranch " is from rancho ; " ranchero " is de rived unchanged ; " rancheree " (an Indian village) is a corruption of rancheria. "Corral," "peon," "rodeo," " hacienda," " major-domo," " latigo," " sombrero," are all direct Spanish -Americans. So is "vaquero" (of which cow-boy is a mere offshot). " Loco-weed " is from loco, crazy. " Cinch " comes from cincha. The cow-boy's leathern " chaps " are short for chapparejos ; and his word " cavvyard " (horse -herd) is a still more remarkable liberty with caballada. A typical cowboy perversion is the familiar, but never before traced, " horse -wrangler." Not in any Spanish dictionary, caballerango is a pure Mexican- ism, now almost obsolete. It meant the man in charge of the spare riding- ponies of an expedition. Caballo, every cowboy knew, was horse ; so, transla ting half the word and corrupting the rest, we got " horse-wrangler." One might follow indefinitely so pleasant by-paths ; but basta ! As throughout, I must merely set up a finger-board and go on. XV THE SPANISH -AMERICAN FACE The seal of Spain is upon all things that she has ever touched. To the thoughtful, few side-lights in history are more striking than this vital individuality of the Spaniard. Whatever page he opened in the New World, he wrote across it his racial autograph in a hand so virile and so characteristic that neither time nor change can efface it. Three centuries and a half of continuous evolution have not availed to make that riibrica illegible or mistakable. He mastered every country between us and Patagonia ; and there is no land in which he ever sat down which does not to this last day bear in its very marrow the heritage of his religion, his language, and his social creed. His marca is upon the faces, the laws, the very landscapes. How significant this is we may better judge when we remember that the Saxon, masterful though he is, has never anywhere achieved these results. He has filled new lands with his speech and his faith (or his lack of it), but only by filling them with his own blood, never by changing the native. The United States, for instance, is of his speech ; but what Indian tribe ever spoke English ? In the vastly greater area of Spanish America every Indian tribe speaks Spanish, and has done so for centuries. The Saxon has never THE ANDALUZ AMERICANIZED THE SPANISH-AMERICAN FACE 1 75 impressed his language or his religion upon the peo ples he has overrun. Something of his face goes to the half-breeds he begets and will not father; but even this physical impress is less marked than in the case of his Latin predecessor. For he himself, of course, is a less fixed type. It is a curious fact that no other nation in history has ever legitimately produced crosses with so many aboriginal bloods as has Spain. The conquistador was human ; but the hand of the church was always upon his shoulder. Individually and casually he might elude it, but broadly he could not. He intermarried with a thousand distinct types of the Original Ameri can ; and all the way from Denver to Valparaiso you can tally the varying fruits of these first wedlocks of the first frontier. You are often in doubt as to the mother, distinct as tribe originally is from tribe ; but the father — you need no directory to find him. Among these mestizos are some of the finest types, physically, of Spanish America. The same astonishing individuality which has stamp ed itself forever upon the offspring of his union with innumerable other bloods has, when he stayed un mixed, as remarkably preserved his own family like ness. Compare the Yankee with the Briton, then the lineal Spanish-American with the Spaniard — and you will marvel to see how much more strongly the latter is " marked " across ten generations than the former across two or three. Among civilized nations only the Jew hands down the ancestral face so per sistently through the ages. The Spanish-American face is always Spanish, yet not quite of Spain. As much to the artist as to the 176 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION anthropologist it is a fascinating study — the differen tiation of this unmistakable and attractive type by local conditions operating for centuries. That is what evolution means ; and here is the very poetry of evolu tion, as true and instructive as the prose. It is lucid verse, too. One may grow so proficient as to guess very shrewdly, from an unmarked photograph, from what section of Spanish America the sitter comes, particularly if it be a woman's face, which is more plastic to the hand of circumstance. Yet there is no sameness. A thousand localities have their local va riants, each as a rule already a recognized type ; each one face has its individuality as clear as with us; and through all, individual or local, runs the inevitable sub-dominant of Spain. We often talk of the Spanish type as exclusively dark — a notion which argues no great knowledge of either history or geography. All Spaniards are not morenos. The swart Moorish tide that ebbed and flowed across Spain for seven centuries did, indeed, leave its eternal mark upon the Gothic-Roman ; but all Spain was not drowned. As you go northward from the Ebro — that is, up where the Moresque wave rather splashed than inundated — you find the nut-brown of Valencia and Castile shading off to lighter hues. Not unknown in other provinces, in Galicia, Arragon, and Asturias, the " gold-haired, heaven-eyed" type is famil iar. And if there is anywhere a more perfect beauty than that of the true Spanish blonde, I would fain treat my eyes to sight of it. Oddly enough, this survival of Spain's first days is practically without representation in Spanish America. In the New World the type is not only a great rarity, YOUNG SPAMSH-AMERICAN TYPE THE SPANISH-AMERICAN FACE 1 77 but a disprized one. The epigrammatic wit of the paisano shows it no mercy. The die ho has a hundred forms ; but in some shape it is current everywhere. Palma, the laureate of Peruvian letters, has given it its most finished form : " Como una y una son dos, Por las morenas me muero ; Lo bianco, lo hizo un platero ; Lo moreno, lo hizo Dios." "As sure as one and one, my elf, Are two, for the brown maids I'm dying. The white is but a tinker's trying, But God, He made the brown Himself." The perfect moreno is the most perfect skin in the world. We talk of olive glibly — and most of us never saw one true olive type. Now and then you find it in Spain, and it is exquisite as rare. But it is not the " browny " and elfish moreno, which is the hue of the "nut-brown maid " of old English balladry. Our fore fathers knew a good thing when they saw it. That perfect brown is so transparent, so fine, so soft, so richly warmed with the very dawn of a flush, as no other cheek that is worn of woman. No other complexion so lends itself to the painter's canvas. Nor would I precisely advise the loveliest of my countrywomen to lay her cheek to one of perfect An- dalusian brown. A yard away, her superior beauty is safe ; but side by side she cannot afford comparison with that skin — nor ever can, till Art shall have re versed the whole gospel of color. Perfection of the moreno type is found in many parts of Spanish America. In Peru it sometimes 178 THE AWAKENING OF A NATION crowns the predominant Andalusian face, the most vivacious of all Spain. In Colombia it is rarer, thanks to the tropics and to — Africa. In parts of Central America, of Cuba, of Mexico, even of New Mexico and California, it has lovely representatives. Mexico is less famous for female beauty than Peru, where Lima heads the mundane list ; but it is not behind in , genuine charm. Its type is less rotund : the peculiar first touch which Peru generally adds is exuberance of curve. As a rule, the facial types of the cooler Spanish -American countries are perhaps not hand somer, but certainly finer, more spiritual, than those nearer the equator. Always and everywhere, the Spanish -American fe male face is interesting; at least as often as in other bloods it is beautiful. Photographs tell but half the story, for complexion is beyond them. But a certain clearness of feature, the almost invariable beauty of the eyes and fine strength of the brows seem as much a Spanish birthright as the high-bred hand and foot. Not even the Parisian face is so flexible in expres sion, so fit for archness, so graphic to the mood. Yet there is a certain presence in it not to be unnoticed, not to be forgotten. To no woman on earth is relig ion a more vital, ever-present, all-pervading actuality ; and that is why you meet the face of the Madonna al most literally at every corner of Spanish- America. And it is not a superficial thing. There is none in whom the wife-heart, the mother-heart, is truer-wom anly. The dofta is human. She may err, but she can never be gross. It is a truth so well known to every traveller that I wonder to find our philosophers so dumb about it — that even when outcast, no woman TZ~i zr:z:zzz zzzzzzzzn face 179 of Spanish blood falls or can fall to the outer vileness which haunts the purlieus of every English-speaking great city. And, thanks to her religion and to her social conservatism, she contributes perhaps fewer re cruits to the outcast ranks than any other civilized woman. At her best she is admirable in heart as in face ; at her average, interesting in both. Years of study of the field in which she is a sociologic part of history have given me to know and to respect her. She is a true woman — which is as good as can be said of any creat ure that is mortal. And for the frontispiece that God gave her — that wise artist-touch of His to cajole the male brute into reading through the best of all books — I can say no more for it than is said : " Es mucha cara, la cara de ella." THE END 08837 4732 ¦ :M: '¦ZZ KHML ^zW&ill