Page:A Study of Mexico.djvu/105

Rh three quarters, and possibly a larger proportion—for in respect to this matter there is no certain information—can not read or write, possess little or no property, and have no intelligent ideas about civil as contradistinguished from military authority, of political liberty, or of constitutional government. The mass of all those engaged in the prosecution of agriculture and the performance of other manual labor are also divided into classes, as separate and distinct from each other as it is possible to imagine a people to be who occupy a common country and acknowledge the same government, and in this respect they greatly resemble the natives of British India. It is difficult, in fact, to express in words, to those who have not had an opportunity of judging for themselves, the degraded condition of the mass of the laboring-classes of Mexico. The veil of the picturesque, which often suffices to soften the hard lines of human existence, can not here hide the ugliness and even hideousness of the picture which humanity exhibits in its material coarseness, and intellectual, or spiritual poverty. The late consul-general Strother, who, as a citizen of one of our former slave-holding States, is well qualified to judge, expresses the opinion, in a late official report (1885), that the scale of living of the