Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/737

 REVIEWS 713

week, and where was a barren and arid horizon, there extends itself a mantle of tender verdure with corn-fields and springing wheat, which from day to day develop, open their spikes to the sun, and seem to cast back to it its last rays, as golden oceans, ruffled by the evening breeze. The laborers busy them- selves in guarding them ; but an unseasonable hailstorm destroys them, or a blast, sudden and nocturnal, from the north freezes them in the very months of August and September ; that is to say, when surrounded by summer haze, or under a cloud sprinkled with twinkling stars, the laborers believe their crops secure and slumber, lulled by the most pleasing anticipations. When they wake the corn is lost ; in twenty-four hours they pass from wealth to misery ; the herd perishes ; field labor stops ; the laborers go forth to rob on the highways, to swell the ranks of the insurgents, or to beg on the street, according to the character of the government. Before the days of the rail- roads, droughts were the cause of local insurrections, which today are impos- sible, because grain may be transported from one district to another or even to the whole country from a foreign land, as happened in 1894, when $30,000,000 worth of American maize was imported. However, the evil is not easily remediable, and a general drought, or a series of local dry seasons, might, as Bulnes indicates, mortally wound our nascent nationality. Agri- culture then, thanks to the droughts of the fields on the one hand, but to the abrupt atmospheric changes on the other, escapes calculation and prevision ; and there are converted into an enterprise as insecure as mining, labors which have ever constituted the principal honest means of livelihood for Mexicans. (P. 27.)

In fine, and ever due, wholly or in part, to the atmosphere, the Mexican of the Central Plateau and so much the less as the altitude of the region where he lives is greater has never been able to count upon the future, either for his life, or for his health, or for his fields, or for his mines, or for his daily bread ; and the apparent lack of uniformity in the phenomena of nature, experienced through generations, has developed in him finally a standard of judgment, composed of simple coexistences, which, in turn, has forged the fixed belief that all in nature is uncertain and capricious. As a logical consequence, there has arisen an unconquerable tendency toward the only manner in his power for reproducing in the same unpredictable form the contingencies of fortune and misfortune of life, so far at least as concerns wealth and misery that is, to gaming ; and thus may be explained the extent of this vice in Mexico. (P. 34.)

But gambling, on a large scale, was indulged by the soldiers of the Conquest, long before the climate had had time to operate upon them. Nor can Guerrero's suggestion be equally applicable to the high table- land of Mexico and the coast plains, and yet the fondness for gaming is as noticeable in Vera Cruz as in Mexico. Again, the prodigious