AN ECONOMIC STUDY OF MEXICO. 25 



only upon the labor in the immediate neighborhood of their line of con- 

 struction ; and that, generally, neither money nor persuasion would 

 induce any great numbers of these people to follow their work any dis- 

 tance from their native fields and villages. In those instances where 

 temporary emigration was effected, the laborers insisted on carrying 

 their families with them. The Government also recognizes to a cer- 

 tain extent this peculiarity in their army movements ; and, whenever 

 a company or regiment moves, the number of women wives of the 

 soldiers accompanying seems almost absurdly numerous. They, how- 

 ever, represent, and to some extent supply, the place of the army 

 commissariat. 



In short, what Mexico is to-day, socially and politically, is the nat- 

 ural and legitimate sequence, and exactly what might have been ex- 

 pected from the artificial conditions which for more than three cent- 

 uries have been forced upon her ; and history has never afforded such 

 a striking, instructive, and pitiful illustration of the effect upon a 

 country and a people, of long-continued absolutism and tyranny in re- 

 spect to both government and religion. It is true that Spain, if called 

 to plead at the bar of public opinion, might point to her own situation 

 and decadence as in the nature of judgment confessed and punishment 

 awarded. But what has the Church, in whose hands for so many years 

 was exclusively vested the matter of education, and which lacked noth- 

 ing in the way of power and opportunity, to say to the appalling depths 

 of ignorance in which she has left the Mexican people ; an ignorance 

 not confined to an almost entire lack of acquaintance with the simplest 

 elements of scholastic learning reading, writing, and the rules of 

 common arithmetic but even of the commonest tools and mechanical 

 appliances of production and civilization ? But, wherever may be the 

 responsibility for such a condition of things, the conclusion seems irre- 

 sistible that, against the moral inertia of such an appalling mass of 

 ignorance, the advancing waves of any higher civilization are likely 

 to dash for a long time without making any serious impression. 



Educational Efforts and Awakening in Mexico. It is, how- 

 ever, gratifying to be able to state that at last the leading men of 

 Mexico have come to recognize the importance of popular education ; 

 and it is safe to say that more good, practical work has been done in 

 this direction within the last ten years than in all of the preceding three 

 hundred and fifty. At all of the important centers of population free 

 schools, under the auspices of the national Government, and free from 

 all Church supervision, are reported as established ; while the Catholic 

 Church itself, stimulated, as it were, by its misfortunes, and appar- 

 ently unwilling to longer rest under the imputation of having neg- 

 lected education, is also giving much attention to the subject ; and is 

 said to be acting upon the principle of immediately establishing two 

 schools wherever, in a given locality, the Government, or any of the 

 Protestant denominations, establish one. In several of the national 



