Chapter 23

PUEBLA. NOPALUCÁN. ORIZABA. POTRERO.

We reached Puebla in the afternoon, and found it a fine Spanish city, with straight streets of handsome stone houses, and paved with flag-stones. We rather wondered at the _pasadizos_, a kind of arched stone-pavement across the streets at short intervals, very much impeding the progress of the carriages, which had to go up and down them upon inclined planes. In the evening we saw the use of them however, for a shower of rain came down which turned every street into a furious river within five minutes after the first drop fell. For half an hour the pasadizos did their duty, letting the water pass through underneath, while passengers could get across the streets dryshod. At last, the flood swept clear along, over bridges and all; but this only lasted a few minutes, and then the way was practicable again. The moveable iron bridges on wheels, which are to be seen standing in the streets of Sicilian cities, ready to be wheeled across them for the benefit of foot-passengers whenever the carriage-way is flooded, are on the whole a better arrangement.

We should never have thought, from looking at Puebla, that it had just been undergoing a siege; for, beyond a few patches of whitewash in the great square, where the cannon-balls had knocked the houses about, there were no traces of it.

We made many enquiries about the siege, and found nothing to invalidate our former estimate of twenty-five killed,—one per cent of the number stated in the government manifestos. Among the casualties we heard of an Englishman who went out to see the fun, and was wounded in a particularly ignominious manner as he was going back to his house.

Revolutions and sieges form curious episodes in the life of the foreign merchants in the Republic. Their trade is flourishing, perhaps,—plenty of buyers and good prices; and hundreds of mules are on the road, bringing up their wares from the coast. All at once there is a pronunciamiento. The street-walls are covered with proclamations. Half the army takes one side, half the other; and crowds of volunteers and self-made officers join them, in the hope of present pillage or future emolument. Barricades appear in the streets; and at intervals there is to be heard the roaring of cannon, and desultory firing of musketry from the flat roofs, killing a peaceable citizen now and then, but doing little execution on the enemy.

Trade comes to a dead stop. Our merchant gets his house well furnished with provisions, shuts the outer shutters, locks up the great gates, and retires into seclusion for a week or a fortnight, or a month or two, as may be. At the time we were there he used to run no great risk, for neither party was hostile to him; and if a stray cannon-ball did hit his house, or the insurgents shot his cook going out on an expedition in search of fresh beef, it was only by accident.

Having no business to do, the counting-house would probably take stock, and balance the books; but when this is finished there is little to be done but to practice pistol-shooting and hold tournaments in the court-yard, and to teach the horses to rayar; while the head of the house sits moodily smoking in his arm-chair, reckoning up how many of his debtors would be ruined, and wondering whether the loaded mules with his goods had got into shelter, or had been seized by one party or the other.

At last the revolution is over. The new president is inaugurated with pompous speeches. The newspapers announce that now the glorious reign of justice, order, and prosperity has begun at last. If the millennium had come, they could not make much more talk about it. Our unfortunate friend, coming out of his den only to hear dismal news of runaway debtors and confiscated bales, has to illuminate his house, and set to getting his affairs into something like order again.

Since we left the country things have got even worse. Formerly, all that the foreign merchants had to suffer were the incidental miseries of a state of civil war. Now, the revolutionary leaders put them in prison; and, if threats are not sufficient, they get forced loans out of them, much as King John did out of his Jews.

Even in times of peace, foreign goods must be dear in Mexico. In a country where they have to be carried nearly three hundred miles on mules’ backs, and where credit is so long that the merchant can never hope to see his money again in less than two years, he cannot be expected to sell very cheaply. But the continual revolutions and the insecurity of property make things far worse, and one almost wonders how foreign trade can go on at all.

One of our friends in Mexico had three or four hundred mules coming up the country laden with American cotton for his mill, just when Haro’s revolution began. He got off much better than most people, however; for, greatly to the disgust of the legitimate authorities, he went down into the enemy’s camp, and gave the revolutionary chief a dollar a bale to let them go.

As may be supposed, commercial transactions have often very curious features here. Strange things happen in the eastern states; but people there say that they are nothing to the doings on the Pacific coast, where the merchants get up a revolution when their ships appear in the offing, and turn out the Custom-house officers, who do not enter upon their functions again until the rich cargos have started for the interior.

One little incident, which happened—-I think—at Vera Cruz, rather amused us. When the Government is hard-up, a favourite way of raising ready money is to sell—of course at a very low price—orders upon the Custom-house, to pass certain quantities of goods, duty-free. Such a transaction as this was concluded between the Minister of Finance and a merchant’s house who gave hard dollars in exchange for an order to pass so many hundred bales of cotton, free of duty. When the ship arrived at port, however, the Yankee captain brought in his manifest with a broad grin upon his face. The inspectors went down to the ship, and stood aghast. There were the bales of cotton, but such bales! They had to be shoved and coaxed to get them up through the hatchways at all. The Customhouse officials protested in vain. The order was for so many bales of cotton, and these overgrown monsters were bales of cotton, and the merchants sent them up to Mexico in triumph.

To us, Puebla was not an interesting city. It was built by the Spaniards, and called _Puebla de los Angeles_, because angels assisted in building the cathedral, which does no great credit to their good taste. Its costly ornaments of gold, silver, jewels, and variegated marbles, are most extraordinary. One does not know which to wonder at most, the value and beauty of the materials, or the unmitigated ugliness of the designs.

We saw the festival of Corpus Christi while we were in Puebla; but were to a certain extent disappointed in the display of plate and jewelled vestments for the clergy, whose attempt to overthrow Comonfort’s government had only resulted in themselves being heavily fined, and who were in consequence keeping their wealth in the background, and making as little display as possible. The most interesting part of the ceremonial to us was to see the processions of Indians from the surrounding villages, walking crowned with flowers, and carrying Madonnas in bowers of green branches and blossoms.

At the head of each procession walked an Indian beating a drum, _tap, tap, tap_, without a vestige of time. The other processions with stoles and canopies, and the officials of the city in dress-coats and yellow kid gloves, were paltry affairs enough.

Neither during this ceremonial, nor at Easter in the Capital were any miracles exhibited, like the performances of the Madonna at Palermo, which the coachmen of the city carry about at Easter, weeping real tears into a cambric pocket-handkerchief; nor is anything done in the country like the lighting of the Greek fire, or the melting of the blood of St. Januarius.

Puebla pretty much belongs to the clergy, who are paramount there. A population of some sixty thousand has seventy-two churches, some of them very large. It is the focus of the church-party, whose steady powerful resistance to reform is one of the causes of the unhappy political state of the country. As is usual in cathedral-towns, the morality of the people is rather lower than elsewhere. I have said already that the revenues of the Mexican Church are very large. Tejada estimates the income at twenty millions of dollars yearly, more than the whole revenue of the State; but this calculation far exceeds that given by any other authority. He remarks that the Church has always tried as much as possible to conceal its riches, and probably he makes a very large allowance for this. At any rate, I think we may reasonably estimate the annual income of the Church at $10,000,000, or £2,000,000, two-thirds of the income of the State.

There is nothing extraordinary in the Church having become very rich by the accumulations of three centuries in a Spanish colony, where the manners and customs remained in the 18th century to a great extent as they were in the 16th, and the practice of giving and leaving great properties to the Church was in full vigour—long after it had declined in Europe. It is considered that half the city of Mexico belongs to the Church. This seems an extraordinary statement; but, if we remember that in Philip the Second’s time half the freehold property of Spain belonged to the Church, we shall cease to wonder at this. The extraordinary feature of the case is that, counting both secular and regular clergy, there are only 4600 ecclesiastics in the country. The number has been steadily decreasing for years. In 1826 it was 6,000; in 1844 it had fallen to 5,200, in 1856 to 4,600, giving, on the lowest reckoning, an average of over £200 a year for each priest and monk. A great part of this income is probably left to accumulate; but, when we remember that the pay of the country curas is very small, often not more than £30 to £50, there must be fine incomes left for the church-dignitaries and the monks. Now any one would suppose that a profession with such prizes to give away would become more and more crowded. Why it is not so I cannot tell. It is true that the lives of the ecclesiastics are anything but respectable, and that the profession is in such bad odour that many fathers of families, though good Catholics, will not let a priest enter their houses; but we do not generally find Mexicans deterred by a little bad reputation from occupations where much money and influence are to be had for very little work.

The ill conduct of the Mexican clergy, especially of the monks, is matter of common notoriety, and every writer on Mexico mentions it, from the time of Father Gage—the English friar—who travelled with a number of Spanish monks through Mexico in 1625, and described the clergy and the people as he saw them. He was disgusted with their ways, and, going back to England, turned Protestant, and died Vicar of Deal.

To show what monastic discipline is in Mexico, I will tell one story, and only one. An English acquaintance of mine was coming down the Calle San Francisco late one night, and saw a man who had been stabbed in the street close to the convent-gate. People sent into the convent to fetch a confessor for the dying man, but none was to be had. There was only one monk in the place, and he was bed-ridden. The rest were enjoying themselves in the city, or fast asleep at their lodgings in the bosom of their families.

In condemning the Mexican clergy, some exception must be made. There are many of the country curas who lead most exemplary lives, and do much good. So do the priests of the order of St. Vincent de Paule, and the Sisters of Charity with whom they are associated; but then, few of these, either priests or sisters, are Mexicans.

Among the curious odds and ends which we came upon in Puebla, in the shop of a dealer in old iron and things in general, were two or three very curious old scourges, made of light iron chains with projecting points on the links—terrific instruments, once in very general use. Up to the present time, there are certain nights when penitents assemble in churches, in total darkness, and kneeling on the pavement, scourge themselves, while a monk in the pulpit screams out fierce exhortations to strike harder. The description carries us back at once to the Egyptian origin of this strange custom; and we think of the annual festival of Isis, where the multitudes scourged themselves in memory of the sufferings of Osiris. A story is told of a sceptical individual who got admission to this ceremony by making great professions of devotion, and did terrific execution on the backs of his kneeling fellow-penitents. Before he began, the place was resounding with doleful cries and groans; but he noticed that the cry which arose when he struck was not like these other sounds, but had quite a different accent. The practice of devotional scourging is still kept up in Rome, but in a very mild form, as it appears that the penitents keep their coats on, and only use a kind of miniature cat-o’-nine-tails of thin cord, with a morsel of lead at the end of each tail, and not such bloodthirsty implements as those we found at Puebla.

It seemed to us that the great influence of the priests in Mexico was among the women of all classes, the Indians, and the poorer and less educated half-castes. The men of the higher classes, especially the younger ones, did not appear to have much respect for the priests or for religion, and, indeed, seemed to be sceptical, after the manner of the French school of freethinking. It was quite curious to see the young dandies, dressed in their finest clothes, at the doors of the fashionable churches on Sunday morning. None of them seemed to go to mass, but they simply went to stare at the ladies, who, as they came out, had to run the gauntlet through a double line of these critical young gentlemen. As far as we could see, however, they did not mind being looked at. The poorer mestizos and Indians, on the other hand, are still zealous churchmen, and spend their time and money on masses and religious duties so perseveringly that one wishes they had a religion which was of some use to them. As it is, I cannot ascertain that Christianity has produced any improvement in the Mexican people. They no longer sacrifice and eat their enemies, it is true, but against this we must debit them with a great increase of dishonesty and general immorality, which will pretty well square the account.

Practically, there is not much difference between the old heathenism and the new Christianity. We may put the dogmas out of the question. They hear them and believe in them devoutly, and do not understand them in the least. They had just received the Immaculate Conception, as they had received many mysteries before it; and were not a little delighted to have a new occasion for decorating themselves and their churches with flowers, marching in procession, dancing, beating drums, and letting off rockets by daylight, as their manner is. The real essence of both religions is the same to them. They had gods, to whom they built temples, and in whose honour they gave offerings, maintained priests, danced and walked in processions—much as they do now, that their divinities might be favourable to them, and give them good crops and success in their enterprises. This is pretty much what their present Christianity consists of. As a moral influence, working upon the character of the people, it seems scarcely to have had the slightest effect, except, as I said, in causing them to leave off human sacrifices, which were probably not an original feature of their worship, but were introduced comparatively at a late time, and had already been almost abolished by one king.

The Indians still show the greatest veneration for a priest; and Heller well illustrates this feeling when he tells us how he happened to ride through the country in a long black cloak, and the Indians he met on the road used to fall on their knees as he passed, and ask for his blessing, regardless of the deep mud and their white trousers. However, this was ten years before we were in the country, and I doubt whether the cloak would get so much veneration now. The best measure of the influence of the Church is the fact that when Mexico adopted a republican constitution, in imitation of that of the United States, it was settled that no Church but that of Rome should be tolerated in the country; and this law still remains one of the fundamental principles of the State, in which universal liberty and equality, freedom of the press, and absolute religious intolerance form rather a strange jumble. It is curious to observe that, though the Independence confirmed the authority of the Roman Catholic religion, it considerably reduced the church-revenues, by making the payment of tithes a matter of mere option. The Church—of course—diligently preaches the necessity of paying tithes, putting their obligation in the catechism, between the ten commandments and the seven sacraments, and they still get a good deal in this way.

We sent our horses to the bath at Pueblo. This is usually done once a week in the cities of Mexico. We went once to see the process while we were in the capital, and were very much amused. The horses had been to the place before, and turned in of their own accord through a gateway in a shabby back street; and when they got into the courtyard, began to dance about in such a frantic manner that the _mozos_ could hardly hold them in while their saddles and bridles were being taken off. Then they put their heads down, and bolted into a large shed, with a sort of floor of dust several inches deep, in which six or eight other horses were rushing about, kicking, prancing, plunging, and literally screaming with delight. I will not positively assert that I saw an old white horse stand upon his head in a corner and kick with all his four legs at once, but he certainly did something very much like it. Presently the old _mozo_ walked into the shed, with his lazo over his arm, and carelessly flung the noose across. Of course it fell over the right horse’s neck, when the animal was quiet in a moment, and walked out after the old man in quite a subdued frame of mind. One horse came out after another in the same way, took his swim obediently across a great tank of water, was rubbed down, and went off home in high spirits.

Though slavery has long been abolished in the Republic, there still exists a curious “domestic institution” which is nearly akin to it. It is not peculiar to the plains of Puebla, but flourishes there more than elsewhere. It is called “_peonaje_,” and its operation is in this wise. If a debtor owes money and cannot pay it, his creditor is allowed by law to make a slave or _peon _of him until the debt is liquidated. Though the name is Spanish, I believe the origin of the custom is to be found in an Aztec usage which prevailed before the Conquest.

A _peon_ means a man on foot, that is, a labourer, journeyman, or foot-soldier. We have the word in English as “_pioneer_” and as the “_pawn_” among chessmen; but I think not with any meaning like that it has come to bear in Mexico.

On the great haciendas in the neighbourhood of Puebla, the Indian labourers are very generally in this condition. They owe money to their masters, and are slaves; nominally till they can work off the sum they owe, but practically for their whole lives. Even should they earn enough to be able to pay their debt, the contract cannot be cancelled so easily. A particular day is fixed for striking a balance, generally, I believe, Easter Monday, just after a season when the custom of centuries has made it incumbent upon the Indians to spend all that they have and all that they can borrow upon church-fees, wax-candles, and rockets, for the religious ceremonies of the season, and the drunken debauches which form an essential part of the festival. The masters, or at least the _administradors_, are accused of mystifying the annual statement of accounts between the labourer and the estate, and it is certain that the Indian’s feeble knowledge of arithmetic leaves him quite helpless in the hands of the bookkeeper; but whether this is mere slander or not, we never had any means of ascertaining.

Long servitude has obliterated every feeling of independence from the minds of these Indians. Their fathers were slaves, and they are quite content to be so too. Totally wanting in self-restraint, they cannot resist the slightest temptation to run into debt; and they are not insensible to the miserable advantage which a slave enjoys over a free labourer, that his master, having a pecuniary interest in him, will not let him starve. They have a cat-like attachment to the places they live in; and to be expelled from the estate they were born on, and turned out into the world to get a living, we are told by writers on Mexico, is the greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them.

There was nothing that we could see in the appearance of these _peons_ to distinguish them from ordinary free Indians; and our having travelled hastily through the district where the system prevails does not give us a right to judge of its working. We can but compare the opinions of writers who have studied it, and who speak of it in terms of the strongest reprobation, as deliberately using the moral weakness of the Indians as a means of reducing them to slavery. Sartorius, however, takes the other side, and throws the whole blame upon the careless improvident character of the brown men, whose masters are obliged to lend them money to supply their pressing wants, and must take the only security they can get. He says, and truly enough, that the system works wretchedly both for masters and labourers. Any one who knows the working of the common English system of allowing workmen to run into debt with the view of retaining them permanently in their master’s service may form some faint idea of the way in which this Mexican debt-slavery destroys the energy and self-reliance of the people.

But in one essential particular Sartorius mis-states the case. It is not the money which the masters lend the _peons_ to help them in distress and sickness that keeps them in slavery. It is the money spent in wax-candles and rockets, and such like fooleries, for Easter and All Saints; in the reckless profusion of drunken feasts on the days of their patron saints, and on the occasion of births, deaths, and marriages. These feasts are as utterly disproportioned to the means of the givers as the Irish wakes which reduce whole families to beggary. The sums of money spent upon them are provided by the owners of the estates, who know exactly how they are to be spent. If they preferred that their labourers should be free from debt, they could withhold this money; and their not doing so proves that it is their desire to keep the _peons_ in a state of slavery, and throws the whole blame of the system upon them.

I have spoken of the _peons_ as Indians, and so they are for the most part in the districts we visited; but travellers who have been in Chihuahua and other northern states tell stories of creditors travelling through the country to collect their debts, and, where money was not forthcoming, collecting their debtors instead,—not merely brown Indians, but also nearly white mestizos.

Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great riches and great poverty is most striking. No traveller ever enters the country without making this remark. The mass of the people are hardly even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things has not produced a permanent aristocracy.

The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting, often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty by the third or fourth generation.

Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual disorders that prevail. In the mining-districts most men make money at some time or other. The difficulty lies in keeping it. There seems to be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine. A good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops in his till. Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has a share of the profits, and when there is a “good thing” going, he is on the spot to profit by it.

When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable ways of employing his money. Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to manage them; and discounting merchants’ bills is a lucrative business. But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for orders to pass goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial transactions familiar to those who know the shifts and mystifications of that astonishing institution, the Finance-department of Mexico.

We rode from Puebla to Orizaba. Amozoque, the first town on the road, is a famous place for spurs, and we bought some. They are of blue steel inlaid with strips of silver, and the rowel is a sort of cogged wheel, from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. _(See page 220.)_ They look terrific instruments, but really the cogs or points of the rowels are quite blunt, and they keep the horse going less by hurting him than by their incessant jingling, which is increased by bits of steel put on for the purpose. Monstrous as the spurs now used are, they are small in comparison with those of a century or two ago. One reads of spurs, of gold and silver, with rowels in the shape of five-pointed stars six inches in diameter. These have quite gone out now, and seem to have been melted up, for they are hardly ever to be seen; but we bought at the _baratillo_ of Mexico spurs of steel quite as large as this.

My companion sent to the Art-exhibition at Manchester a couple of pairs of the ordinary spurs of the country, such as we ourselves and everybody else wore. They were put among the mediæval armour, and excited great admiration in that capacity!

We slept at Nopalucán that night, and rode on next day to San Antonio de Abajo, a little out-of-the-way village at the foot of the mountain of Orizaba. Our principal adventure in the day’s ride was that, finding that our road made a détour of a mile or so round a beautiful piece of green turf, we boldly struck across it, and nearly lamed our horses thereby; for the ground was completely undermined by moles, and at every third step the horses’ feet went into a deep hole. We had to get off and lead them back to the road.

Orizaba is the great feature in the scenery of this district of Mexico. It is one point in the line of volcanos which stretches across the continent from east to west. It is a conical mountain, like Popocatepetl, and about the same height; measurements vary from twenty feet higher to sixty feet lower. The crater has fallen in on one side, leaving a deep notch clearly visible from below. At present, as we hear from travellers who have ascended it, the crater, like that of Popocatepetl, is in the condition of a _solfatara_, sending out jets of steam and sulphurous acid gas. About three centuries ago its eruptions were frequent; and its Mexican name, _Citlaltepetl_, “Mountain of the Star,” carries us back to the time when it showed in the darkness a star-like light from its crater, like that of Stromboli at the present time, when one sees it from a distance.

San Antonio de Abajo is a quaint little village, frequented by muleteers and smugglers. Tobacco, the principal contraband article, is grown in the plains just below; and, once carried up into the paths among the mountains, it is hard for any custom-house officer to catch sight of it.

When there was a government, there used sometimes to be fighting between the revenue-officers and the smugglers; but now, if there is a meeting, a few dollars will settle the disputed question to the satisfaction of both parties, so that the contraband trade, though profitable, is by no means so exciting as it used to be.

On the road towards San Antonio we saw ancient remains in the banks by the road-side, but had no time for a regular examination. We slept on damp mattresses in a room of the inn, where the fowls roosted on the rafters above our heads, and walked over our faces in the early morning in an unpleasant manner. We started before daybreak, and a descent down a winding road, through a forest of pines and oaks, brought us by seven in the morning from the region of pines and barley down to the district where tobacco and the sugar-cane flourish, at the level of 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the sea.

We met a jaunty-looking party in the valley, two women and five or six men, all on good horses, and dressed in the extreme of fashion which the Mexican _ranchero_ affects—broad-brimmed hats with costly gold and silver serpents for hat-bands, and clothes and saddles glittering with silver. Martin rode up to us as they passed, and said he knew them well for the boldest highwaymen in Mexico. Had we started an hour or two later we should have met them in the forest, and have had an adventure to tell of. As it was, the descent of three thousand feet had brought us from a land of thieves to a region where highway robbery is never known, unless when a party from the high lands come down on a marauding expedition. It is an unquestionable fact that the Mexican robbers, whose exploits have become a matter of world-wide notoriety, all belong to the cold region of the plateaus, the _tierra fría_. Once down in the _tierra templada_, or the _tierra caliente_, the temperate or the hot regions, you hear no more of them; or at least this is the case in the parts of Mexico we visited. The reason is clear; it is only on the plateaus that the whites, preferring a region where the climate was not unlike that of Castile, settled in large numbers; so that it is there that Creoles and mestizos predominate, and they are the robbers.

We rode over great beds of gravel, cut up in deep trenches by the mountain-streams; then along the banks of the river, among plantations of tobacco, looking like beds of lettuces. As we were riding along the valley, we saw before us a curious dark cloud, hanging over some fields near the river. Our men, who had seen the appearance before, recognized it at once as a flight of locusts, and, turning out of the high-road, we came upon them just as they had settled on a clump of trees in a meadow. They covered the branches and foliage until only the outline of the trees was visible, while the rest of the swarm descended on a green hedge, and on the grass. As for us, we went and knocked them down with our riding-whips, and carried away specimens in our hats; but the survivors took no manner of notice of us, and in about ten minutes they left the trees mere skeletons, leafless and stripped of their bark, and moved across the field in a dense mass towards some fruit-trees a little way off. For days after this, when we met with travellers on the road, or stopped at the door of a cottage to get a light or something to drink, and chatted a few minutes with the inhabitants, we found that our descent of the mountain-pass had brought us into a new set of interests. News of the government and of the revolutionary party excited no curiosity,—talk of robbers still less. At every house the question was, “¿_De donde vienen, Señores_?” “Where are you from, gentlemen?”—and when we told them, “¿_Y estaban allí las langostas_?” “And were the locusts there?” The whole country was being devastated by them; and the large rewards offered for them to the peasants, though they caused dead locusts to be brought by tons, seemed hardly to diminish their numbers. Firing guns had some slight effect in driving off the swarms of locusts; and in some places the reports of muskets were to be heard, at short intervals, all day long. Some idea of the destruction caused by the locusts may be formed from the fact that in six weeks they doubled the price of grain in the district. Fortunately, they only appear in such numbers about once in half a century.

We had ridden a hundred miles over a rough country in the last forty-eight hours, and were glad to get a rest at Orizaba; but on the morning of the third day we were in the saddle again, accompanied by a new friend, the English administrador of the cotton-mill at Orizaba. Until we left the high-road, the country seemed well cultivated, with plantations of tobacco, coffee, and sugar-cane; but as soon as we turned into by-paths and struck across country, we found woods and grassy patches, but little tilled ground, until we arrived at the Indian village which we had gone out of our way to visit, Amatlán, that is to say, “_The place of paper_.”

In its arrangement this village was like the one that I have already described, with its scattered huts of canes and palm-leaf thatch; but the vegetation indicated a more tropical climate. Large fields, the joint property of the community, were cultivated with pine-apples in close rows, now just ripening; and bananas, with broad leaves and heavy clusters of fruit, were growing in the little garden belonging to each hut. The inhabitants stared at us sulkily, and gave short answers to our questions. We went to the cottage of the Indian alcalde, who declared that there was nothing to eat or drink in the village, though we were standing in his doorway and could see the strings of plantains hanging to the roof, and the old women were hard at work cooking. However, when Mr. G. explained who he was, the old man became more placable; and we were soon sitting on mats and benches inside the hut, on the best of terms with the whole village. The life of these people is simple enough, and not unsuited to their beautiful climate. The white men have never interfered much with them; and it has been their pride for centuries to keep as much as possible from associating with Europeans, whom they politely speak of as _coyotes_, jackals. The priest was a _mestizo_, and, as the Alcalde said, he was the only _coyote_ in the settlement; but his sacred office neutralized the dislike that his parishioners felt for his race.

These Indian communities always rejoiced in being able to produce for themselves almost everything necessary for their simple wants; but of late years the law of supply and demand has begun to undermine this principle, and the cotton-cloth, spun and woven at home, is yielding to the cheaper material supplied by the factories. Though so averse to receiving Europeans among them, they do not object to go themselves to work for good wages on the plantations. Those who leave their native place, however, bring back with them tastes and wants hitherto unknown, and inconsistent with their primitive way of life.

Another habit of theirs brings them into contact with the “reasonable people,” not to their advantage. They are excessively litigious, and their continual law-suits take them to the large towns where the courts of justice are held, and where lawyers’ fees swallow up a large proportion of their savings. There is a natural connexion between farming and law-suits; and the taste for writs and hard swearing is as remarkable among this agricultural people as it is among our own small farmers in England.

Theoretically, the Indians in their villages live under the general government, like any other citizens; for, since the establishment of the republic, the civil disabilities which had kept them down for three centuries were all abolished at a sweep, and the brown people have their votes, and are eligible for any office. Practically, these advantages do not come to much at present, for custom, which is stronger than law, keeps them under the government of their own aristocracy, composed of certain families whose nobility dates beyond the Conquest, and was always recognized by the Spaniards. These noble Indians seem to be pretty much as dirty, as ignorant, and as idle as the plebeians—the ordinary field-labourers or “_earth-hands_” (_tlalmaitl_), as they were called in ancient times,—and a stranger cannot recognize their claims to superiority by anything in their houses, dress, language, or bearing; nevertheless, they are the patrician families, and republicanism has not yet deprived them of their power over the other Indians. In early times, when men of white or mixed blood were few in the country, it suited the Spanish government to maintain the authority of these families, who collected the taxes and managed the estates of the little communities. The common people were the sufferers by this arrangement, for the Alcaldes of their own race cheated them without mercy, and were harder upon them than even their white rulers, just as on slave-estates a black driver is much severer than a white one.

Near some of the houses we noticed that curious institution—the _temazcalli_, which corresponds exactly to the Russian vapour-bath. It is a sort of oven, into which the bather creeps on all fours, and lies down, and the stones at one end are heated by a fire outside. Upon these stones the bather sprinkles cold water, which fills the place with suffocating steam. When he feels himself to have been sufficiently sweated, he crawls out again, and has jars of cold water poured over him; whereupon he dresses himself (which is not a long process, as he only wears a shirt and a pair of drawers), and so goes in to supper, feeling much refreshed. If he would take the cold bath only, and keep the hot one for his clothes, which want it sadly, it would be all the better for him, for the constant indulgence in this enervating luxury weakens him very much. One would think the bath would make the Indians cleanly in their persons, but it hardly seems so, for they look rather dirtier after they have been in the _temazcalli_ than before, just as the author of _A Journey due North_ says of the Russian peasants.

To us the most interesting question about the Mexican Indians of this district was this, _Why are there so few of them?_ There are five thousand square leagues in the State of Vera Cruz, and about fifty inhabitants to the square league. Now, let us consider half the State, which is at a low level above the sea, as too hot and unhealthy for men to flourish in, and suppose the whole population concentrated on the other half, which lies upon the rising ground from three thousand to six thousand feet above the sea. This is not very far from the truth, and gives us one hundred inhabitants to the square league—about one-sixth of the population of the plains of Puebla, in a climate which may be compared to that of North Italy, and where the chief products are maize and European grain.

In the district of the lower temperate region, which we are now speaking of, nature would seem to have done everything to encourage the formation of a dense population. In the lower part of this favoured region the banana grows. This plant requires scarcely any labour in its cultivation; and, according to the most moderate estimate, taking an acre of wheat against an acre of bananas, the bananas will support twenty times as many people as the wheat. Though it is a fruit of sweet, rather luscious taste, and only acceptable to us Europeans as one small item of our complicated diet, the Indians who have been brought up in the districts where it flourishes can live almost entirely upon it, just as the inhabitants of North Africa live upon dates.

In the upper portion of this district, where the banana no longer flourishes, nutritious plants produce an immense yield with easy cultivation. The _yucca_ which produces cassava, rice, the sweet potato, yams, all flourish here, and maize produces 200 to 300 fold. According to the accepted theory among political economists, where the soil produces with slight labour an abundant nutriment for man, there we ought to find a teeming population, unless other counteracting causes are to be found.

The history of the country, as far as we can get at it, indicates a movement in the opposite direction. Judging from the numerous towns the Spanish invaders found in the district, the numbers of armed men they could raise, and the abundance of provisions, we must reckon the population at that time to have been more dense than at present; and the numerous ruins of Indian settlements that exist in the upper temperate region are unquestionable evidence of the former existence of an agricultural people, perhaps ten times as numerous as at present. The ruins of their fortifications and temples are still to be seen in great numbers, and the soil all over large districts is full of the remains of their pottery and weapons.

How far these settlements were depopulated by wars before the Spanish Conquest, it is not easy to say. During the Conquest itself they did not offer much resistance to the European invaders, and consequently they escaped the wholesale destruction which fell upon the more patriotic inhabitants of the higher regions. Since that time the country has been peaceable enough; and even since the Mexican Independence, the wars and revolutions which have done so much injury to the inhabitants of the plateaus have not been much felt here.

In reasoning upon Mexican statistics we have to go to a great extent upon guess-work. A very slight investigation, however, shows that the calculation made in Mexico, that the population increases between one and two per cent. annually, is incorrect. The present population of the country is reckoned at a little under eight millions; and in 1806, it seems, from the best authorities we can get, to have been a little under six millions. Even this rate of increase, one-third every half-century, is far above the rate of increase since the Conquest; for, at that rate, a population a little over a million and a quarter would have brought up the number to what it is at present, and we cannot at the lowest estimation suppose the inhabitants after the siege of Mexico to have been less than three or four millions. So that, badly as Mexico is now going on with regard to the increase of its population, about ½ per cent. per annum, while England increases over 1½ per cent., and the United States twice as much, we may still discern an improvement upon the times of the Spanish dominion, when it was almost stationary.

Why then has this fertile and beautiful country only a small fraction of the number of inhabitants that formerly lived in it? That it is not caused by the climate being unfavourable to man is clear, for this district is free from the intense heat and the pestilential fevers of the low lands which lie nearer the sea.

It is a noticeable fact that the remains of the old settlements generally lie above the district where the banana grows; and the higher we rise above the sea, the more abundant do we find the signs of ancient population, until we reach the level of 8,000 feet or a little higher. The actual inhabitants at the present day are distributed according to the same rule, increasing in numbers, according to the elevation, from 3,000 to 8,000 feet, after which the severity of the climate causes a rapid decrease.

In making these observations, I leave out of the question the hot unhealthy coast-lands of the _tierra caliente_, and the cold and comparatively sterile plains of the _tierra fría_, and confine myself to that part of the country which lies between the altitudes of 3,000 and 8,000 feet, between which limits the European races flourish under circumstances of climate which also suited the various Mexican races, who probably came from a colder northern country. Now, if we begin to descend from the level of the Mexican plateau—say 8,000 feet above the sea—we find that less and less labour will provide nourishment for the cultivator of the soil, until we reach the limit of the banana, where the inhabitants ought to be crowded together like Chinese on their rice-grounds, or the inhabitants of Egypt in the time of Herodotus. Exactly the opposite rule takes effect; the banana-country is a mere wilderness, and the higher the traveller rises the more abundant become both present population and the remains of ancient settlements.

I suppose the reason of this is to be found in the habits and constitution of the tribes who colonized the country, and preferred to settle in a climate resembling that of their native land, without troubling themselves about the extra labour it would cost them to obtain their food. The European invaders have acted precisely in the same way; and the distribution of the white and partly white inhabitants of the country follows the same rule as that of the Indians.

So far the matter is intelligible, on the principle that the constitution and habits of the races which have successively taken up their residence in the country have been strong enough to prevail over the rule which regulates the supply of men by the abundance of food; but this does not explain the fact of an actual diminution of the inhabitants of the lower temperate districts. They were not mere migratory tribes, staying for a few years before moving forward. They had been settled in the country long enough to be perfectly acclimatized; and yet, under circumstances apparently so favourable to their increase, they have been diminishing for centuries, and are perhaps even doing so now.

The only intelligible solution I can find for this problem is that given by Sartorius, whose work on Mexico is well known in Germany, and has been translated and published in England. This author’s remarks on the condition of the Indians are very valuable; and, as he was for years a planter in this very district, he may be taken as an excellent authority on the subject. He considers the evil to lie principally in the diet and habits of the people. The children are not weaned till very late, and then are allowed to feed all day without restriction on boiled maize, or beans, or whatever other vegetable diet may be eaten by the family. The climate does not dispose them to take much exercise; so that this unwholesome cramming with vegetable food has nothing to counteract its evil effects, and the poor little children get miserably pot-bellied and scrofulous,—an observation of which we can confirm the truth. A great proportion of the children die young, and those that grow up have their constitutions impaired. Then they live in close communities, and marry “in-and-in,” so that the effect of unhealthy living becomes strengthened into hereditary disease; and habitual intemperance does its work upon their constitutions, though the quantities of raw spirits they consume appear to produce scarcely any immediate effect. Among a race in this bodily condition, the ordinary epidemics of the country—cholera, small-pox, and dysentery—make fearful havoc. Whole villages have often been depopulated in a few days by these diseases; and a deadly fever which used to appear from time to time among the Indians, until the last century, sometimes carried off ten thousand and twenty thousand at once. It seemed to me worth while to make some remarks about this question, with a view of showing that the theory as to the relation between food and population, though partly true, is not wholly so; and that in the region of which we have been speaking it can be clearly shown to fail.

After spending a long morning with the Indians and their _cura_, we took quite an affectionate leave of them. Their last words were an apology for making us pay threepence apiece for the pineapples which we loaded our horses with. In the season, they said, twelve for sixpence is the price, but the fruit was scarce and dear as yet.

Our companion, besides being engaged in the Orizaba cotton-mill, was one of the owners of the sugar-hacienda of the Potrero, below Cordova, and we all rode down there together from the Indian village, and spent the evening in walking about the plantation, and inspecting the new machinery and mills. It was a pleasant sight to see the people coming to the well with their earthen jars, after their work was done, in an unceasing procession, laughing and chattering. They were partly Indian, but with a considerable admixture of negro blood, for many black slaves were brought into the country in old times by the Spanish planters. Now, of course, they and their descendants are free, and the hotter parts of Mexico are the paradise of runaway slaves from Louisiana and Texas; for, so far from their race being despised, the Indian women seek them as husbands, liking their liveliness and good humour better than the quieter ways of their own countrymen. Even Europeans settled in Mexico sometimes take wives of negro blood.

I have never noticed in any country so large a number of mixed races, whose parentage is indicated by their features and complexion. In Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent. In America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race, distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer gives in his work on Mexico, such as _mulatto, mestizo, zambo, chino_, and so forth. Here all the brown Mexican Indians are taken as one race, and the Red Indians of the frontier-states are not included at all. If we come to dividing out the various tribes which have been or still are existing in the country, we can count over a hundred and fifty, with from fifty to a hundred distinct languages among them.

Out of this immense variety of tribes, we can make one great classification. The men of one race are brown in complexion, and have been for ages cultivators of the land. It is among them only that the Mexican civilization sprang up, and they still remain in the country, having acquiesced in the authority of the Europeans, and to a great extent mingled with them by marriage. This class includes the Aztecs, Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Zapotecs, &c., the old Toltecs, the present Indians of Central America, and, if we may consider them to be the same race, the nations who built the now ruined cities of Palenque, Copan, Uxmal, and so forth. The other race is that of the Red Indians who inhabit the prairie-states of North Mexico, such as the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos. They are hunters, as they always were, and they will never preserve their existence by adopting agriculture as their regular means of subsistence, and settling in peace among the white men. As it has been with their countrymen further north, so it will be with them; a few years more, and the Americans will settle Chihuahua and Sonora, and we shall only know these tribes by specimens of their flint arrow-heads and their pipes in collections of curiosities, and their skulls in ethnological cabinets.

One of the strangest races (or varieties, I cannot say which) are the _Pintos_ of the low lands towards the Pacific coast. A short time before we were in the country General Alvarez had quartered a whole regiment of them in the capital; but when we were there they had returned with their commander into the tierra caliente towards Acapulco. They are called _“Pintos”_ or painted men, from their faces and bodies being marked with great daubs of deep blue, like our British ancestors; but here the decoration is natural and cannot be effaced.

They have the reputation of being a set of most ferocious savages; and, badly armed as they are with ricketty flint- or match-locks, and sabres of hoop-iron, they are the terror of the other Mexican soldiery, especially when the war has to be carried on in the hot pestilential coast-region, their native country.