Vol. XXV, No. 5 



WASHINGTON 



May, 1914 



THE 



ATDONA1L 



©(SESAME© 

 'MsAM. 



a 



MEXICO AND MEXICANS 



By William Joseph Showalter 



Especial attention is called to the map of Mexico published as a supplement 

 to this issue of the National Geographic Magazine. It contains the latest and 

 most accurate information of the geography of the country, and also gives the 

 transportation routes open and in prospect, as well as the contours of altitude. 

 The map is the highest example of the cartographer s art that has been produced 

 with Mexico as its subject. Additional copies of the map may be obtained from 

 the offices of the National Geographic Society. Price, 50 cents each; mounted on 

 linen, $1. 



PERHAPS nowhere else in the 

 world is there a country so full of 

 contrast as Mexico. With a uni- 

 versity established before John Harvard, 

 Elihu Yale, or William and Mary were 

 born, the masses of its people are hope- 

 lessly ignorant. With a hospital founded 

 before Jamestown was even dreamed of, 

 it is one of the most backward regions 

 of the earth in a medical way. With 

 natural riches greater than those of a 

 thousand Midas's, its masses are just as 

 poor as the proverbial church mouse. 

 With a constitution as perfect as any or- 

 ganic law in the civilized world, it is a 

 nation whose rulers always have been a 

 law unto themselves. 



Effigies of Judas Iscariot — to be 

 burned, crunched, exploded, or hanged 

 by the neck until dead — may be bought 

 in the same stores that sell the latest 

 creations of the dressmakers' and the 

 milliners' arts from Paris. A bull ring, 

 built of American steel and concrete, 

 stands within earshot of the Republic's 

 leading hotel, and the sound of the per- 

 fervid cheering of the sun-gods as they 

 applaud their favorite matador when he 



executes a brilliant pass, and the band 

 responds with the Diana, may be wafted 

 into the very precincts of the American 

 Embassy itself. 



Here you will see a Mexican half- 

 breed, barefooted, wearing a dollar pair 

 of trousers, a fifty-cent shirt, and a ten- 

 dollar sombrero. There, at a single glance 

 and within the length of a single city 

 block, you may see an Indian car gad or, a 

 donkey, an ox-cart, a carriage, a railroad 

 train, a street-car, and an automobile — 

 almost every type of locomotion since 

 Adam. 



WIDE CUMATIC RANGE 



You may tread the burning sands of a 

 tropical desert with the wet of the per- 

 petual snow of towering mountains still 

 upon your shoes. You may take a single 

 railway journey of 36 hours in which 

 the people you see at the railroad station 

 will be dressed in four different weights 

 of clothing. 



Land of the inordinately rich and of 

 the abjectly poor; land of the aboriginal 

 Indian and of the twentieth-century busi- 

 ness man ; land of perpetual snow and of 



