Page:Appleton's Guide to Mexico.djvu/173

Rh system which is infinitely the grandest and most extensive in the world. Supplemented as these great avenues of trade and travel will be by innumerable turnpikes, which will form so many lateral tributaries, and for the construction of which the face of the country affords exceptional facilities, their influence will be felt throughout the length and breadth of the land.

But what Mexico needs, far more than the expansion of her physical resources, is the elevation of the toiling millions of her people. This result can only be achieved by their education, not alone in the lessons of the schools, but in the various branches of skilled industry and in social progress and enlightenment.

Thus far almost the only step which has been taken toward the intellectual culture of the young has been to provide schools for the training of the children of Spanish blood. Surely it requires no argument, in our day, to prove that the facilities for acquiring at least the elementary branches of education ought to be placed within the reach of every child, without reference to color, creed, or lineage.

This accomplished, the proper steps ought to be, and doubtless will be, taken to vest the ownership of the soil in its cultivators. The present land-tenure is what might reasonably be expected from the history of the country. Three centuries and a half ago the Spanish adventurers wrested it by force from the natives, and they and their descendants, almost without exception, have held it by the strong arm of power ever since.

Of all the lessons of history, none is more emphatic than that the ownership of the soil by its cultivators is essential to a successful and profitable agriculture. The history of France before the outbreak of the Revolution in the year 1789, the history of the British Islands, that of Ireland in particular, and our own experience as a nation