Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/344



FTER more than half its territory had been taken by its grasping neighbor the United States, Mexico still was about four times the size of France, with a coast-line of fifty-eight hundred miles and a common boundary with the United States of eighteen hundred miles.

Exclude the Rio Grande, which divides the two nations for nearly half this distance, and Mexico may be called a riverless country. The magnificent harbors which open along its western coast are just beginning to be known, though several of them are among the finest in the world. Guaymas, a village at the mouth of a small river emptying into the Gulf of California, is now the terminus of a railroad which gives direct communication with St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York and all our great cities. An active trade is springing up which will soon bring the place into competition with some of its better-known neighbors. From San Bias, farther south, on the Pacific coast, a road runs eastward to Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico. Acapulco, another railroad terminus, has a noble land-locked harbor, and is likely to be one of the queen-cities of the South-west. It is probable that Mexico, so long closed to a free commerce, will first be opened on the north, on its landward side, and that its