Page:Mexico's dilemma.djvu/45

Rh Bowery and Halsted Street. Poor and peon, middle class and foreigner, rub elbows on the sidewalks as newsboys run through the streets with extras.

But what incongruous sights one sees! I rode out the Paseo de la Reforma, the Riverside Drive of Mexico City, to see the palatial homes of the Cientificos, those great houses where the old followers of Diaz lived like monarchs. In the parkways along the sides of the street nurse girls were wheeling the babies of the wealthy. On this thoroughfare there were no signs of poverty, although the street pavement itself was a motly compound of holes and pavement and the carriage bumped and jostled from curb to curb. A little later I walked up Avenida Juarez where beggars seem to crawl out of every doorway. Not far from the Spanish Embassy, a big palatial structure, I paused at the barracks of the second infantry regiment to listen to the band and to watch the soldiers saunter here and there with nothing to do but "kill time," smoke cigarettes and talk to their wives and children who are as numerous as the soldiers themselves. On the curb, in front, sat a big, fat Mexican woman smoking a brown cigarette. A baby, just able to walk, stood in the street before her, sucking at its mother's breast and punching it with its bony fists in an effort to extract the morning breakfast. A soldier handed the woman a cake. She tied this in a soiled handkerchief where she carried her money and other