322 MEXICO. 
ceeding statement,) of $13,000,000, independent of payment of interest, 
balances, and loans. Yet with all these incumbrances, created under the 
most usurious exactions, it is greatly to her honor that she has not repu- 
diated the claims of her creditors ; — a moral and political firmness in which 
she may well be emulated by some of those very States that have been 
loudest in their thoughtless abuse of a sister Republic. 
A late Mexican paper states, that the Minister of the Treasury of Mex- 
ico has published a decree, by which the President directs twenty-five 
per cent, of all the receipts of the Custom Houses of the Republic to be 
set apart as a " sinking fund," to pay the public debt. This fund is to 
be inviolable. The decree provides for the consolidation and funding of 
the debt at the rate of a six per cent, stock, for which it will be ex- 
changed by such as choose. Those who do not embrace this arrange- 
ment with the Government are to have their claims liquidated, only, when 
out of the sinking fund now created, those who accede to the exchange of 
stock, shall have been first of all paid! 
If we exclude the American debt, now in the course of payment, (an 
exclusion nevertheless improper, as the Government has but changed her 
responsibility from a foreign creditor to a domestic one,) the debt of Mex- 
ico may still be fairly estimated at $82,000,000, which, at six per cent., 
bears an annual interest of $4,920,000. The actual income from cus- 
toms and all resources may be set down at $13,000,000 — 25 per cent, on 
which will produce a fund of $3,250,000, or $1,670,000 less than the in- 
terest on the whole debt f It may well be asked whence is to proceed the 
" sinking fund," so long as such a deficiency exists ? 
TABLE OF THE EXPENSES OF THE MEXICAN GOVERN- 
MENT IN 1840. 
SUPKEME POWEES. DoUais. Total 
Poder Conservador, - - - - - -' 30,000 
Legislature, - - - - - - - 319,550 
Executive, Ministers, Council, Secretary, Archives, &c. 230,930 
Supreme Court, 79,300 
$659,780 
DIPLOMACY. 
Legations, Consuls, Commissioners, &c. - - ^—^— 140,000 
TEE ASTIR Y. 
National Treasury, Almacenes generales, Direccion 
de Rentas, Heads of the Treasury, and Depart- 
mental Treasuries, ..-.-- 251,758 6 
Pensions to retired officers, - - - - . 174,942 
Pensions of the Mont de Piete, ... - 160,554 
587,254 6 
$1,387,034 6 
