Chapter IV: Part I: Old Mexico (2)

It is an early discovery that Mexico is a grave and not a gay city. There are no crowds on the sidewalks, no eating of ices in public, no _cafés chantants_, nothing Parisian. By nine or ten o’clock the people seem to have retired, perhaps to be up betimes in the morning for the work of the day. A military band plays three evenings in the week, but even these concerts, except on Sundays, are so sparsely attended that the men seem discoursing the music for their own amusement.

Policemen are stationed at short intervals apart in the quiet streets, with their lanterns set in the middle of the roadway. They are obliged, by regulation, to signal their whereabouts every quarter of an hour. The sound of their whistles, which have a shrill, doleful note, like that of a November wind, is heard repeated from one to another all the night through.

II.

As Mexico has not, until lately, at any rate, expected tourists, there are almost none of the usual appurtenances for their pleasure and information to be met with. While this may have its annoyances, if an ardent curiosity be baffled too long, on the other hand freedom from the sense of responsibility to exacting Baedekers and Murrays has advantages of its own. The visitor with an eye for the picturesque dips into a delicious feast of novelties, makes discoveries on every hand, and has the pleasure of testing the value of his own unaided conclusions. By daylight, with all its bright colors upon it, and its normal stir of life going on, the famous capital is a very different place from what it was at night. By little and little misapprehensions are shaken off. After the first moments of disappointment we like it always more instead of less, and in the end it takes a powerful hold.

Here at length is the great central plaza, in which events of such moment have been transacted. To actually sit down upon a bench in the midst of it, and gaze comfortably about—can it be possible?

The imposing cathedral makes a new pyramid on the spot where once stood the pyramid of the Aztec war-god. These stones should be ankle-deep with all the blood of various sorts that has been spilled upon them. For a moment one renews the pagan superstition. I would gladly see set up again, for a brief instant, old Hutzilopotchli, the war-god, aloft on his ancient terrace, hear the beat of the lugubrious war-drum, and see the mournful procession of captives winding up to the sacrifice, in charge of the sinister priests with their black locks flowing down upon their shoulders.

But not one instant too long. What! hideous priests, you will indeed lay them down on the sacrificial stone, and raise the knives of flint above their bared breasts for the monstrous slaughter? Not one hair of their heads shall be harmed. San Jago and Spain! When was Castilian ever known to turn his back upon a foe? Up the pyramid we go, leaping from step to step, though with no better weapon than a sun-umbrella in hand, to their deliverance. Ay, howl if you will, baffled miscreants, and rattle your spears and arrows like hail upon us! Down with your old Hutzilopotchli till he crashes in fragments below there. Your carven sacrificial stone shall be set up in the court-yard of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos for this, and your great calendar-stone, a show-piece, against the side of the cathedral.

It is a good day’s work. I estimate that there were in that train of captives not less than a hundred souls!

But it is hard to conjure up images of desperate conflicts, though there have been so many, in this bright sunshine, with the multitude of pretty, novel sights. On one side of the square a beneficent institution, the National Loan Establishment, occupies what was once the site of the palace of Cortez; on another, the long, white, monotonous National Palace, the site of that of Montezuma. In the centre is a charming little garden, with benches, the Zocalo.

The cathedral, like most of the earlier architecture, is in the Renaissance style, far gone to the vagaries of rococo. It is saved from finicality, however, by its great size and massiveness, except in respect to the terminations of its towers, which are in the shape of immense bells. Adjoining, and forming a part of it, is a parish church, in a rich, dark-red volcanic stone, with carving that recalls the fantastic façades of Portuguese Belem. What a painting it would make, on one of the perfect moonlight nights, which bring out every line of the sculpture softly, and show the whole like a lovely vision!

There are little book-stalls in front, and gay booths devoted to the sale of refreshing drinks—_aguas nevadas_—from large, simple jars and pitchers of most noble and pleasing shapes. The drinks are dispensed by dusky Juanas and Josefas of Indian blood, with straight black braids of hair down their backs. With a characteristic taste the fronts of their booths are often wholly studded and banked up with flowers, and furnished with inscriptions formed in letters of carnation pinks and blue cornflowers.

Figures go by in blankets which one hankers to take from them for _portières_ or rugs. The men of the poorer sort wear or carry, universally, the _serape_—a blanket with a slit in the centre for the insertion of the head. Apart from its artistic patterns, it is a useful garment in many emergencies. It is not the most improbable thing in the world that, in the course of the Mexican revival, we may yet see it introduced in the States, and running a course of popularity like the ulster. The corresponding garment of the women is the _rebozo_, a shawl or scarf, generally of blue cotton, which, crossed over the head and lower part of the face, gives a Moorish appearance. The background of life here seems more like opera than sober existence. Two other sides of the square are occupied by long arcades, among the merchants of which, protected from the sun and rain, one may wander by the hour, watching the shrewd devices of trade, and picking up those knick-knacks, trifling in the country of their origin, which are certain to be curiosities elsewhere. From time to time pass across the view, dark and Egyptian-like, in a peculiar dress of bluish woollen, trudging under heavy burdens, Indians who have yet preserved the tradition of their race. Followed to their homes, they are found to dwell, among the ruined walls of the outskirts, in adobe huts which can have changed little since the time of the Conquest.

These genuine Aztecs have peculiarly soft, pleasant voices, in contrast with the Spanish voice, which is apt to be harsh. They are shiftless and squalid, but their manners are above their surroundings. It is a favorite way with the Mexican to say, “This is your house;” and I have had said to me on being introduced, “Well, now, remember! number so-and-so, such a street, is your house.”

Having looked into one of these Indian abodes, and asked an elderly woman, by way of making talk, if it were hers, she replied, “Yes, Señor, and yours also.”

Neither in the Zocalo nor the Alameda (a park, which holds somewhat the position of the Common, in Boston), are there trees with the hoary antiquity one might expect in such time-honored places. But it appears that the setting out of the trees, and the formation of the Zocalo entirely, is of modern date, the work of Maximilian, a monarch who, in his short, ill-fated reign, had many excellent projects.

The Zocalo is occasionally allowed to be enclosed, and an admission-fee charged, for select festivities. The orations were delivered there, for instance, on the national festival of the 5th of May. When I first arrived a flower-show was in progress. I have never seen anything more charming of the sort. Our florists might get a score of new ideas for the arrangement of bouquets. Strawberries were introduced into some for effects of color. Little streamers with gallant mottoes floated from others. There were lanterns, and birds in cages. A military band played, and people promenaded—dandies with silver-braided hats, stout duennas, and fathers of families, and slender, lithe señoritas, wearing the graceful mantilla instead of the Paris bonnet.

In front of the Zocalo a permanent flower market is held every morning, which is almost as pleasing.

Tramway cars run out of the plaza in numerous directions. The city early utilized this invention, and boasts of having one of the most complete systems existing. The inscriptions on them have an attractive look. One would like to take all the different routes at once. Patience! it is all accomplished in time. Shall we go to Guadalupe Hidalgo, with its treasures and its miraculous Virgin; to Tacubaya and San Angel, with their villas; Dolores, with its pensive cemetery, full of sculptures; La Viga, with its picturesque canal, giving access to the _chinampas_ of flowers and vegetables; the gates of Belem and Niño Perdido, familiar in the story of the American conquest; Chapultepec? Yes, that shall be the very first—Chapultepec, theatre of exploits of American valor and of moving events in every historic epoch.

Mexico is extraordinarily flat, and laid out as regularly at right angles as our own symmetrical towns. At the ends of all the streets the view is closed by mountains. Its flatness, together with its position in reference to the adjoining lakes, are circumstances which have occasioned great solicitude in the past, and still call for almost as much, on a different ground. Formerly it was danger of inundation; now it is defective drainage. Bad odors offend the nostrils, and stagnant gutters and heaps of garbage the sight, of the wayfarer about the interesting streets.

The drainage problem, divested of the mystery with which it has been surrounded in learned treatises, is simply this. When the vast slope from the sea has been surmounted, and the Valley of Mexico—as high as the Swiss pass of St. Gothard—is reached, it is found to be a shallow depression, containing six lakes. These are of many different levels—Texcoco the largest and lowest. On the edge of Texcoco, or in the midst of it, like another Venice, with canals for streets, was built ancient Mexico. This principal lake received the overflow of the others, and the city was subject to frequent inundations. It is even now, after a large shrinkage in the lakes, but a little more than six feet, at its central portion, above Texcoco. The waters of the three upper lakes—San Cristoval, Xaltocan, and Zumpango—were turned back as has been done with the Chicago River of late. A great Spanish drain in the early seventeenth century, the Tajo of Nochistongo, was cut through the mountains, and got rid of it in the direction of the Atlantic.

But Texcoco itself has no outlet, and, as experience has proved, even with only Chalco and Xochimilco to be taken care of, is still liable to overflow. With relief from this peril is inseparably bound up the drainage problem. The fall is so slight at best, that though Lake Texcoco be preserved at a normal level, and kept from backing up into the sewers, there is no destination for the sewage received by it, which lies festering in the stagnant water. With the rest is complicated also the irrigation of the valley. No end of plans have been offered to resolve these difficulties. Their history would make an interesting chapter by itself. Some have proposed to pump out the lake by steam; others, to intercept the waters running into it, and allow it to dry up naturally; another, to exhaust it by means of a great siphon of stone and cement. But the judgment of most is in favor of establishing a current, through a canal, to some point lower than the lake; and the mountains in the neighborhood have been searched for the most favorable point of exit for such a canal.

The plan was officially adopted, in fact, and a considerable beginning made, under the direction of an able engineer of foreign education, Don Francisco Garay. But the works were allowed to languish. Neither government nor community seemed more than half-hearted in the effort to get rid of evils to which they had so long been used. The problem still remains one of the most pressing of those to be resolved, and one of the most interesting to foreigners intending to make Mexico their home.

III.

Choosing any street at random where all are so attractive, and proceeding to its termination, in this direction or that, you arrive now at a mere _cul-de-sac_, now at a city gate, now at vestiges of adobe fortifications, with a moat. Few vehicles, apart from the hackney-coaches, are to be seen, but plenty of troops of laden donkeys, and everywhere the cotton-clad natives themselves bearing loads under which the regular beasts of burden might stagger. There is a story that when wheelbarrows were first introduced to their notice on the railroad works, the natives filled them in the usual way, and then carried them on their backs.

Each separate kind of business has its distinctive emblem. The butcher—elsewhere not a person noted for great taste in ornament—displays a crimson banner, and has his brass scales decked with rosettes. His supplies are brought him by a mule, trotting along with quarters of beef or carcasses of mutton on each side hung from hooks. But it is especially the _pulque_ shops (corresponding to our corner liquor stores) which devote themselves to decoration in its most florid form. Not one so poor as to be without its great colored tumblers, and ambitious fresco of a battle scene, or subject from mythology or romance. They delight in such titles as “The Ancient Glories of Mexico,” “The Famous St. Lorenzo,” “The Sun For All,” “The Terrestrial Paradise,” and even “The Delirium,” which often enough expresses the condition of customers who imbibe too freely.

On the tramways pass not only passenger-cars, but others for freight. They move the household goods of a family, for instance. There are also impressive catafalques and mourning-cars, running smoothly along, with funeral processions. You may graduate from a hearse with six horses, driver, lackey, and four pall-bearers, all in livery, for $120, to one drawn by a single mule for $3; and there are cars for the mourners in the grand style at $12 and plain for $4.

Both these ideas, it would seem, might be advantageously adopted by suburban lines of our own.

Presently comes by a more economical funeral—a couple of _peons_ (as the Indian laborers are called), at a jog-trot, bearing a pine coffin on their shoulders.

Battered old churches and convents on a great scale, and of a grand architecture, now for the most part devoted to other purposes, are extraordinarily frequent. Before the sequestration of Church property—in the war called of the Reform, under Juarez, in 1859—Mexico was well-nigh one great ecclesiastical estate. Without going into the religious question, and supposing only the operation of ordinary causes, it is easy to see how the Church corporations—repositories of the gifts of the faithful, moved by no feverish haste in speculation, and with no reckless heirs to spend their gains—must in course of time have become possessed of an enormous share of worldly goods.

There is no lack of sculptured old rococo palaces, of the conquerors and their successors, either. Many of these are of a peculiar, rich red stone, with carved escutcheons above their door-ways. There is one of which I was fond, in the Calle de Jesus, with immense water-spouts to its cornice, in the shape of field-pieces. Wheels and all project in high relief.

Only infinitesimal quantities of vacant land exist within the compass of the city. All is compactly built. The Continental system of _portes cochères_ and interior court-yards prevails. How many glimpses, both pleasing and curious, into these interiors! What a pity that the severity of our winters prevents building in a style which would be so admirably adapted to our summers! Over the entrances of some tenement-houses are placed pious dedicatory signs, as “Casa de la Santisima,” “Casa de la Divina Providencia.”

One day, as I made a hasty sketch of one of these, with a water-carrier lying asleep in the archway, the custodian came out and offered strenuous objections. “You are mapping the house” (_mappando la casa_), he said, “and I do not see how it can be for other than evil purposes.”

One of the most charming of all the mansions I saw stood nearly opposite our hotel, and was faced up entirely with china tiles, chiefly blue and white, and set with old bronze balconies, as dainty and quaint as a dwelling in fairy-land. I examined the interior of this house also, and found it faced within as well with the same simple, Moorish-looking, tiles, in staircase walls, ceilings, and even the high, banked-up furnace, or range, in the kitchen. An affable major-domo occupied his leisure with painting, in a large library on the ground-floor. He was just now engaged in copying and enlarging, very poorly, the photograph of a lady, over which he held up his brush for criticism. A maroon carpet was laid up the centre of a grand staircase, and the same uniform color prevailed in the carpets throughout. The rooms were large and high, the principal ones opening both on the street, and, by means of light glass doors draped with lace, on the balconies running around the courts. These balconies are edged in the general practice with climbing vines and rows of handsome plants. In one of the rear courts could be heard and seen the family carriage-horses, together with others for the saddle, stabled according to custom under the common roof.

There was a large saloon, with divans, and old-fashioned mirrors, sloped forward from the walls, instead of pier-glasses; and a little boudoir, with furniture entirely in gilded wood and cane. There was a pretty family chapel, with two _prie-dieux_ for the master and mistress, and a couple of benches for the use of the servants. In the bedrooms of such houses are usually religious pictures, copies of Murillo and the like; and there are also found quaint effigies of sacred things, as a representation of the Nativity; a Christ, with purple mantle and crown of thorns; a life-size Virgin, in raiment of tissue of silver, standing upon the globe and a serpent’s head. The men of the country are very widely imbued with the sceptical spirit of the age, but the women, whose property these objects are, are still devoutly Catholic.

These rooms, in such interiors, though less lofty and impressively finished perhaps than those at Havana, have not the complexity of objects with which we, in an ill-understood passion for decoration, overload our own in the United States. They are large, and contain a few simple articles, with plenty of space around, and have an unmistakable dignity of effect. When we can make up our minds to do that, instead of depending upon a complication of costly rarities in little space, we shall begin to be palatial, and not merely _bon bourgeois_.

We do not know how republican we are, after all our travelling abroad and reverence for things European, till we come to where the stately old Continental traditions are actually in force.

One of the enthusiasts of the new progressive movement, writing of late of Monterey, a city of 40,000 people, in the north, already connected with us by the Mexican Central Railway, and coming into notice as a winter resort, notes, as one of the signs of improvement, that “the old Latin style of building, the square, flat-roofed house, with interior court, is giving place, in the new quarters, to American architecture.” To which I reply, Heaven forbid! Let us never “improve” away with “American architecture” the Moorish-looking dwellings which, to lovers of the picturesque, should be one of the principal inducements for visiting the country.

V.

_THE PROJECTORS._

I.

Meanwhile the court-yard of our hotel, the palace of the ancient Emperor Iturbide, is full of a curious group of English-speaking foreigners, discussing a multitude of projects. They sit usually in chairs on a little terrace at the left of the court, behind which is a modest little parlor, with a piano. As a general rule, the Mexican hotel is without parlor, reading-room, or any other of those appurtenances we are accustomed to look upon as an essential part of the composition of a hotel.

The guests take their meals at a restaurant, entered from the second court, or at other restaurants in the town where they please, there being no provision by the hotel itself. They look up wearily at their rooms around the circumscribing galleries, push their hats on the back of their heads, and pass their hands across their brows. The atmosphere, at this elevation of 7600 feet, is very rare, it will be remembered, and most are affected at first by a feeling of dizziness and loss of appetite. They do not find themselves quite right in health; and even the most athletic pause once or twice, and hold by the balusters, on their way up-stairs. The same amount of exercise cannot be taken, in fact, by either men or animals, as in a more dense atmosphere. The horses, for instance, though good and speedy, can only be run short distances, and then, as evaporation is rapid and draughts particularly dangerous, must not be let stand, but must be walked up and down till gradually cooled.

I recollect my first glimpse of my room, to which, after an interview with the sepulchral clerks below, I was shown by the barefooted boy, “Pancho,” carrying a tallow dip. It was without windows or other opening except through a large transom above the door, and seemed hot and suffocating. This may have been the influence of imagination, however, for the climate is rarely either hot or cold, but noted for its remarkable evenness. There is no provision for heating during the winter. It is said that even after a very few minutes of fire, in stove or grate, the already thin air becomes so much farther expanded as to produce discomfort. Later, in my long stay at this hotel, I had a room higher up, on the sculptured front, looking down upon the life in the thoroughfare, which, taking a separate name at every block, is here the Calle de San Francisco. Again, I had one with a window commanding the shining, tile-covered dome and part of a garden approach to the lovely old convent of San Francisco, now devoted to the uses of an Episcopal mission, and beyond that the mountains, with the fair blue sky above them. Rising to begin the day, the mornings were found peaceful and lovely, the genial sunshine bathing the prospect, the blue sky but varied with the piled-up clouds out of which castles in the air are constructed. The visitor, having got over his temporary oppression, remarks upon this almost unbroken series with increasing wonder and admiration. It is hardly the custom to comment on the weather in Mexico, at least in the agreeable season, though the rainy season is a different matter.

“A pleasant day?” says the listener, with lifted eyebrows, should you do so. “Well, why not?”

Most familiar among the group of English-speaking foreigners in the court-yard during my stay was General Grant, who has lent a part of his great fame to the development of the resources of a much-suffering people. Did he ever reflect in these historic halls, one wondered, on the career of the Emperor Iturbide? Had all the talk on Cæsarism in the Press ever put the idea the least bit in his head? Rumors, mischievous to the cause of amity, ran at the very time that it was in Mexico, not the United States, that he proposed to found his empire. Certainly it would be difficult to imagine so unmelodramatic a figure in the robes and stars and crosses in which Iturbide has arrayed himself, after the pattern of Napoleon the Great, in his portrait at the National Palace.

Iturbide wrote in his memoirs—which, as a display of egotism, are highly interesting reading—one sagacious sentence. “Devotees of theories,” he says, “are apt to forget that in the moral as in the physical order only a gradual progress can be expected.”

This is very true; but the short-lived Emperor forgot, as have many of his republican successors, that despotism can never educate the citizen for the duties of freedom.

Only once before—namely, on the coming of Maximilian—has there been a stir that might be compared to the present in a country which the progress of the century has heretofore seemed to ignore. Could a secure government then have been established, much would have been done. But the new-comers arrived as masters, not as friends; and the conditions were wholly unfavorable. The real improvements, too, apart from those intended for the glitter and the comfort of the throne, were but the shadow of those proposed to-day.

Here the more efficient lighting of the city by electric light was heard discussed; there the opening of coal mines; here the establishment of sugar refineries, shoe factories, cotton mills. There were archæologists, constructors of telegraph lines, and engineers starting out or returning from reconnoissances. This person had come down to look into coffee-plantations; that, to establish a new line of steamers. This discourses of the improving tranquillity of the country, and asserts that three ploughs are now sold to one revolver. He names over prominent bandits who have become peaceable contractors and farmers.

Some will organize banks of issue, and rid us of the cumbrous silver dollar. Another is up from the interior with a scheme for a colony and mines—much too rose-colored, one would say—with which he will start back to New York to organize a syndicate. Mines of gold and silver are one of the specialties of the country; but they seem to present fully the uncertainties of mines elsewhere.

Some organized dinners, at which Mexican senators and deputies were enlisted for the cultivation of more friendly relations. These were held at the Concordia restaurant, or the Tivoli of Bucarelli, or of the Eliseo (summer gardens), with spacious banqueting halls. Much international good-feeling was manifested, and the Mexican national anthem and the “Star Spangled Banner” were played alternately after the speeches. Everything was to be made over anew. A few of the younger men were going and returning from expeditions of pleasure. They came back from a bull-fight; from the baths of Alberca Pane, where there is a fine tank for swimming, covered with an awning; or the theatre. They had many an amusing gibe, after our American way, on the backwardness of things, and the difference of manners and customs in the country.

But pleasure had as yet few votaries; the object of most was serious work. The business of railroad-building, and procuring of charters and subventions from government, threw all else into the shade. Five great lines, two of which had already made long strides, were to traverse the country from north to south, and more than twice as many from east to west, connecting the oceans. There were said to be six hundred American engineers in Mexico. They are often young graduates of Cornell and other polytechnic schools. In the capital the engineers and employés form settlements in boarding-houses of their own; make resorts of certain economical restaurants where little but English is spoken. They associate but little with the natives, but go about their work rather rough-and-ready in appearance, and seem to postpone adornment till the heat and burden of the campaign are over. There was a noticeable Southern element among them; and it will be found, generally, that the enterprises in Mexico have attracted a large representation from the Southern States. There is still, among the rest, a remnant of the ex-Confederate officers who came hither after the war, to engage—without great success, as it happened—in coffee-planting and the like.

Not a few of the young engineers, however, particularly those who have their field of operations in the provinces, have already found wives among the slender señoritas of the country. It seems another case of going after the women of Moab, as it were, for the rumor comes back that these exacting helpmeets have often made them change their religion, as a preliminary to naming the happy day.

II.

A leading point with the projectors, is whether or not Mexico is likely to become a large or metropolitan city. It seems difficult, when on the ground, to doubt it. Great cities have sprung up at a mere intersection of railroads. But here is one with a population of 250,000 people already, a seat of government and of schools, colleges, museums, and galleries of fine arts, with an admirable climate and extraordinary scenery, and three hundred and sixty years and traditions of great fascination behind it. There are to come into or connect with it, when all is complete, the Mexican Central, National, and International roads, from the north; the Mexican Oriental, on the eastern sea-board, and Occidental, on the western; and General Grant’s road, the Mexican Southern, from the south—all to have interoceanic branches and feeders; the Morelos road, the Acapulco road, the English road to Vera Cruz; another, now constructing, to the same point by Puebla and Jalapa; and a number of short lines of less importance.

A small portion only of this would be sufficient to create a metropolis outright, while Mexico has grown to a certain greatness with no advantages at all—not even wagon-roads. It seems its manifest destiny, with its central position on transcontinental lines, and its established prestige, to become the chief depository and place of exchange for the whole country. It ought to be a favorable point, too, for manufactures, and to become the metropolitan residence of the wealthy from the interior. These have rarely come to the capital heretofore. Not even the senators and deputies bring their families, owing to the barbarous state of the roads. The existing difficulties of communication can hardly be conceived. There are perfectly authentic accounts of persons who have gone from Mexico to Vera Cruz, thence to New York, thence across to San Francisco, and thence by Pacific mail-steamer to Acapulco, rather than make the direct journey of three hundred miles on muleback over the sierra.

It is fair to say, however, that there are those who think the future metropolis may be farther to the north, as at San Luis Potosi.

If Mexico, then, is to be a great city, whither is it to spread? It is compactly built within, and much of the land about it is low, traversed by causeways. There is no better place to think about it, nor to look down upon the capital as a whole, than Chapultepec.

My first visit there was made on the tramway, where I fell in with a Mexican colonel, who told me that he liked the Americans very well. He had spent some time in captivity among them, having been taken prisoner at San Jacinto, and had learned to know them as they are. They mean well, he said, and are enterprising and appreciative of the arts of life; and you can depend upon what they say. Most of his countrymen, he said, very sensibly, did not understand this, but were distrustful and jealous. Their idea of American character, in fact, is largely derived from foreign books in which it is conventionalized and caricatured in an unfriendly way. There is evidence of it on every hand. The American, as touched upon in the newspapers and current literature, is the “Yankee” of Dickens and followers of less intelligence on the Continent. He is a sordid person, exclusively wrapped up in “dollars,” and can know but little of the chivalrous nature of those who thus superciliously disapprove of him.

There is nothing very warlike about Chapultepec at present. A glimpse is got, as you approach, of a light, oblong, colonnaded edifice, with a lookout on the top, which is now a part of the government observatory. The hill is not precipitously high, though of a good elevation. There is a monument at its foot to the memory of the pupils of the military school who fell in its defence in 1847, and in the grounds moss-grown cypresses and a tank of clear water. I found the main part of the building, when an upper terrace was reached, in a state of ruin. The light iron columns of an arcade had been coquettishly painted and gilded, and its walls decorated in the Pompeian style, under Maximilian, but all had been wrecked in the revolutions. There was a little garden, in which a small guide picked me some flowers. He answered, “_Quien sabe?_” in a childish lisp, to most inquiries, just as his father, the custodian, if he had been there, would have answered in his deeper base. “_Quien sabe?_” (Who knows?) is a more dreamy and speculative rendering of our own “Give it up,” or perhaps “Dunno!”

The most prominent object, in the long line of the distant city against the bright gleam of Lake Texcoco behind it, is a sudden little volcanic hill—El Peñon—which rises out of it like a teocalli; and next to this the cathedral.

As the lay of the land is studied from here it seems rather natural that the city of the future, on grounds of good drainage, ease of access, and scenery, should advance in this direction to Chapultepec, ex-palace of the Montezumas and of viceroys, military school, fortress, and observatory, on the foremost spur of the foot-hills.

This was the intelligent forecast of Maximilian—a ruler, it must be admitted, much better fitted to cope with such pleasant matters than the ferocity of Mexican war and diplomacy. And such was the view of a rather wild-cat American Improvement Company, found among the projectors in the court-yard, which professed to intend a large purchase of land for building upon, to sell part of it, with houses, on the instalment plan, and to put up a mammoth hotel.

It seemed a little incongruous, this selling of the heritage of Montezuma on the instalment plan; but we are a people who do not stop even at the most venerable of traditions; and the scheme might not be a bad one in responsible hands.

Maximilian also made Chapultepec his summer palace, and laid out to it the handsome Paseo de la Reforma, the afternoon drive and promenade—the Bois and Central Park of fashionable Mexico. During Lent, however, fashion takes the caprice of changing to the Paseo de la Viga, along the canal by which vegetables and flowers are brought to the capital from the floating gardens. The Paseo de la Reforma is a wide, straight boulevard, nearly two miles long, starting from a certain equestrian statue of Charles IV. of Spain—the first bronze cast in this hemisphere, and fine and excellent work. It is two hundred feet wide, and has a double row of trees—eucalyptus and ash—shading its sidewalks. The Mexican equestrian dandy should be observed as he curvets his horse along it among the fine carriages. He wears now not only his weighty spurs and silver-braided sombrero, but a cutlass at his saddle-bow, and larger revolvers than ever. Not that there is need of them, since a couple of mounted carbineers—of whom there seems no great need either—are stationed at nearly every hundred yards; but they are a part of his peculiar display. Some of our young Americans, too, in the country, it must be said, almost out-Mexican the Mexicans themselves, carrying all their customs to an exaggerated extreme.

There are to be six circles, with statues, spaced at proper intervals along the way. The first, containing a fine Columbus, is finished; a Guatemozin, for the second, is in progress. The next, it is said, will contain Cortez. There at last will stand, face to face—their countrymen now one people—the heroic defender and the heroic conqueror, the two characters of such contradictory traits within themselves, who both acted according to their lights in their day and generation, and but followed the path of inevitable destiny.

The causeways of La Veronica and La Romita—containing ancient small-arched aqueducts, which bring water to the city—branch off from Chapultepec, and form two sides of an obtuse triangle, which the Paseo (or Calzada) de la Reforma bisects. It was along these causeways that the Americans ran, in that invasion of a very different character, in 1847. It is said that as Shields was charging on that to the right, after the fall of the castle, Scott, fearing his imprudent haste, sent to detain him. The aide had got as far as the preliminary “General Scott presents his compliments, and begs to say—” when Shields, apprehending the message, cut him short with, “I have no time for compliments now,” and hurried on, and got into the city before he could be overtaken.

Do the Mexicans bear us a grudge for all that? They seem just now to have amiably forgotten it, and far be it from me to revive such memories in a boasting spirit. There is a behind-the-scenes to it, here, upon the ground. It is pathetic, and by no means calculated to produce complacency, to read in the small history studied in the schools the Mexican account of what took place. The almost unbroken series of defeats from which they went up, without hope of success, to the slaughter are frankly admitted. The country was torn by internal dissensions. The generals went back from the field to put down or sustain governments, refused to aid one another in their operations, and availed themselves of the troops given them to seize upon power, instead of fighting the Americans. There were not less than eleven changes of government, chiefly violent, during the short course of the war. In February and March of the year in which, in September, the invaders made their entry there had been fighting in the streets of the capital for well-nigh a month between two presidents, neither strong enough to put the other down. Want of courage is not a Mexican failing. It was want of leaders, unity, everything that gives steadiness in a great crisis.

The land ostensibly aimed at by the so-called Improvement Company follows the Calzada of the Reform for a considerable part of its length. It lies vacant, except for use as pasture. It has not been safe to live too far from the thickly-settled district till the establishment of law and order by the present administration, and the city itself has furnished room enough. But what new accommodations are to be needed in the great future, with the vision of which imaginations are regaling themselves, it is not an easy matter to determine.

Villas were spoken of, to be built with restricted rights, so as to preserve a select and park-like aspect. There were to be front lots enough on the Calzada alone to pay the cost. The grand hotel talked of was to surpass anything on the continent.

If somebody would but put up a hotel equal to our own of the second grade it would be a boon to American travellers. It might expect to draw, too, not a few of the Mexicans themselves, who are hardly slower than the rest of the world in recognizing a good thing when they see it. The magnates who shall have made fortunes in the new enterprises, and others who have them already, could, no doubt, be relied on for a liberal patronage.

III.

This project is of no farther importance than as a text for a mention of the Mexican tax and real estate laws, which have their features of decided interest. “In the moral as in the physical order,” as our friend Iturbide tells us, “only a gradual progress can be expected.” A nation of nine or ten millions, two-thirds of whom are of pure Indian blood, used only to the most primitive and poverty-stricken ways of life, cannot be too suddenly pushed forward. They must be allowed to go at a certain pace, even with the best of intentions, and slowly adapt themselves to the improvements designed for their good; for it is by them, the rank and file, after all, that these must be supported.

The country might seem, at first sight, the most glorious place for real estate speculation in the world. Real property is not taxed except upon such income as it produces. When not actually producing income, it may be idle indefinitely, and escape scot-free, however much it may enhance in value meanwhile. But there are embarrassing restrictions, devised through fear and jealousy of the foreigner, which make the prospect much less attractive. The traveller of means cannot follow his whim, as he might almost anywhere else in the world, of buying a pretty bit of land or house that attracts him and leaving it, to return to when he will, or do what he please with it.

By the Mexican Civil Code “no foreigner may, without previous permission of the President of the Republic, acquire real estate in the frontier states or territory within twenty leagues of the frontier.” And “it is absolutely prohibited to foreigners to acquire rustic or urban property within five leagues of the coast.”

This may be well enough, and is aimed principally at the United States, as a way of preventing any gradual encroachments from the borders; but farther, and more important: no foreigner may own real property at all, except on condition of remaining permanently and looking after it. If he be absent from the country for two years, his property may be denounced and entered by the first comer, the same as if it were a mine. He cannot even have an agent in the country to hold it for him. Nor, even should he comply with the rigid condition named, could he then sell it to another foreigner.

The transient foreigner, so far as he is concerned, cannot acquire real estate on any condition.

All this is set down in the Code in the most explicit terms. The most driving improvement company, therefore, could sell lots only to Mexicans. The class of wealthy Americans expected as winter residents would be ruled out of the calculation, though, of course, they may stop at the hotel.

There is also some ambiguity as to what commercial corporations, with one-third of their directors resident in the country, may or may not do, since the construction of the term “corporation” is not the same as with us. Some construing or explanatory enactments are needed to remedy the ambiguity last mentioned, and an entire sweeping away is needed of all the rest.

If there be sincerity in the manifestations of desire for progress, and aid from without, Mexico must sweep away narrow and benighted restrictions. If outside capital be demanded for works of amelioration and embellishment, how can it be expected at such a price?

And why, in the name of goodness, in this enlightened day, should not the foreigner be put upon the same footing as the native in these matters, and allowed to hold property wherever he will throughout the civilized world?

Let the foreigner bear in mind, too, that he must be matriculated at the Department of Foreign Affairs, through the Consul-general, in order to have any recognized standing in a court of justice, in cases of difficulty. Without this formality even his foreignness is not necessarily conceded to him as a protection.

VI.

_THE FERRO-CARRILES._

I.

The _ferro-carriles_, the _caminos de fierro_, or railways, were the business of the hour. In speaking of the coming greatness of the capital I mentioned glibly the principal ones which are supposed to have a part in it. They are by no means all built. Far from it! It is not even certain that some of the most promising of them, on paper, ever will be built.

The matter of granting railroad charters in Mexico is by no means new. They have been granted for thirty years or so, to Europeans and natives, who did little or nothing with them. It was only when, under the adoption of a more enlightened policy, they came to be granted to Americans that the roads were built and the charters had a value. At once everybody who prided himself upon the necessary influence began to desire a charter also. He might not want to use it at once, but could keep it and see what turn things were to take. Or he might transfer it to some more powerful ownership to which it would be worth a consideration. This new ownership, too, might wait to see what was likely to happen. If railways promised to be profitable in the country, it was well for certain great corporations in the United States to have their feeders or extensions there; at any rate, they could keep others from the field till they should be satisfied of its character.

It is in this way, I surmise, that some of the present franchises have been got, and are reflectively held. There have been henchmen to procure them and turn them over to patrons, who wait a while before going to work, trusting to influence to procure the proper extensions and renewals of time, if needed.

Stories were afloat of practices employed in the obtaining of concessions and subsidies, which I should prefer to believe falsifications. I heard one or two of them, it is true, from somewhat inside sources, and such practices are not unknown elsewhere; yet I like much better to think that there are no persons of standing and influence in Mexico who could prostitute their high position, and put a shameless greed for gain before the public interest in a crisis like the present, as these stories seem to indicate.

“Why, in our great West,” said an American visitor, settling himself back in his chair to complain vigorously of certain treatment he had received, “if an immigrant comes among us, we give him a lift. We help him build his house, or perhaps put him up a barn; and are glad to do it. If he has capital to start some kind of factory, we give him a piece of land free of charge. That is the American style. We put our hands in our pockets and pay out a little, knowing full well that we shall get it back in time in the greater prosperity of the town.”

“Yes,” I said, by way of sympathy with his aggrieved situation, and a proper pride in the American style of doing things, “and I am told that, in Chicago and St. Louis, they pay his hotel bills a while, and try to keep him, if not as a permanent resident, at least long enough to get out a new census, in which he may be included.”

“But here,” my interlocutor continued, “there is nothing of the kind. The first thing they ask about a new-comer is, ‘How much can we make out of him?’ They want pay for permitting him to do something for them. There is no public spirit, no local pride. What they want is exorbitant gains.”

He went on to tell of an application for a charter by an American company, which was absolutely refused. They were afterward approached and told that the privilege would be granted to a committee of Mexican senators, who would in their turn transfer it to the company for a handsome consideration. The go-betweens in this negotiation declared that the personages who were to have the final voice in the granting of the charter, as well as themselves, would require to be paid, which might have been true, and might not. A liberal share of the subsidy to be voted for the railway was to be exhausted in this way.

I do not know whether this be anything more than political “striking,” or black-mailing, with which we are familiar at Albany and elsewhere, and whether the corruption ever really reaches to head-quarters. At any rate, it was said that some part of the aid devoted to each several enterprise was diverted in this way to private benefit. The drainage of the valley had been offered in the United States at a reduction of forty per cent. from the amount voted by the appropriation bill, the difference to be retained by the purveyors of the opportunity. One hundred thousand dollars in cash was demanded, again, as a preliminary, for the opportunity to fill in the works of a certain harbor with stone at a reasonable rate. Such accounts may be worth looking into by Mexican authority, with the interest of good and economical work and the abatement of scandal at heart. There is probably no better form of patriotism for Mexico just now than a strict and uncompromising honesty of administration.

II.

There were entered in the convenient statistical hand-book known as the “Annuario Universal,” for the year, a list of forty-one railways as in _explotacion_ (running), or under construction. But after many of those enumerated was inserted a note, to the effect that, owing to some unforeseen delay, the works were not yet begun. Taking out these, and a larger number on which, though technically begun, little or no labor had been expended, there was still an unlooked for array of constructed roads. Taking out the English road from Vera Cruz, and what had been done by the American companies, almost at the moment, these were found to consist of short bits of local line scattered throughout the country. There was not a through line among them; many were operated by animal traction only; they had been built by natives, been afflicted by bankruptcies and other troubles; and represented the railway situation of the country apart from outside assistance. You were even drawn a good part of the way by animals on the English branch from Vera Cruz to Jalapa; and in going from Mexico to the mines at Pachuca, after leaving the main line at Ometusco, we took first a diligence, and were then pulled by mules in a Philadelphia-built horse-car. The number of these isolated bits has not increased in the mean time, several of them having been bought up and incorporated in the larger enterprises.

In the mean time, however, the list of projected roads at least has been liberally increased. The Congressional session of 1881 was the most active ever known in the authorization of new enterprises on a great scale. The great Mexican Central, trunk line, had, however, been chartered in 1878, and the Mexican National in 1880. The first charter under the modern movement dates from October, 1867; and since then the Mexican Government has issued charters for over 20,000 miles of road, with subsidies probably to the amount of $200,000,000. Many of these, with their subsidies, have lapsed, of course. The Government is now held for about 15,000 miles of road, and subsidies of $90,000,000.

The enterprises on a great scale are all American, and the chief ones among them may be estimated roughly as follows:

Miles.
Mexican Central (Boston Company) 2,000
Mexican National (Palmer-Sullivan) 2,000
Sonora (Boston Company) 500
Mexican Southern (General Grant, President) 1,000
Oriental (De Gress and Jay Gould) 1,200
Topolobambo (Senator Windom, President) 1,200
International (Frisbie and Huntington) 1,400
Pacific Coast (Frisbie) 3,000
------
Total 12,300

To these may be added the Sinaloa and Durango, from the city of Culiacan to the port of Altata, in Sinaloa; the Tehuantepec railway, and Captain Eads’s ship railway across the same isthmus, to take the place of a ship canal. The privilege to build an American railway across Tehuantepec, it may be remembered, was secured (at the same time with the lower belt of Arizona) by the Gadsden treaty of 1853, supplementary to that of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The road was supposed to be needed for the consolidation of relations with our then newly acquired territory of California. The Pacific railroad filled its place, however, and the project, taken up and dropped from time to time, has since had but a lingering existence.

Captain Eads proposes to transport bodily ships of 4000 tons, 190 miles, by land. He will have twelve lines of rails, and four locomotives at once; and, to avoid jarring in transit, changes of direction will be made by a series of turn-tables instead of curves. The scheme is a startling one, and meets with no little opposition. It is still only on paper; but its proposer, who has abundantly vindicated his sagacity in constructing the jetties of the Mississippi and the great St. Louis bridge, remains firm in his conviction that he will be able to sail ships across the isthmus on dry land.

III.

The several enterprises are succinctly divided into two classes—those on the ground, and those on paper. It is not necessarily a disparagement to the last that they are still in such a condition, for many of them are of very recent origin.