Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/101

 with the works of the Romans, and it saw the final resistance and execution of Maximilian. Mexico itself has 250,000 inhabitants. I have summed up here nearly a million of people; and it would seem that a railroad along the line of which are scattered such communities as these, grown to their present dimensions without even tolerable means of approach, need not lack for support. True, large numbers of the people are Indians and very poor; but I point to the example of Don Benito Juarez, the liberator of his country from the French, an Indian of the purest blood, and to numerous others accessible on every hand, to show that there is nothing inherent in the race itself to debar it from the highest development with increase of opportunities. And if any suppose that they do not like to travel, let him simply inspect the excursion trains where third-class cars are supplied to them in sufficient numbers.

I made the trip over the section of the Central to the small city of Tula. Its principal feature is the passage through the great Spanish drainage cut, along one side of which it has been allowed to terrace its track. This cut—the Tajo of Nochistongo, before mentioned, designed for keeping the lakes from inundating the valley—was begun under the viceroys as far back as 1607, and continued for a couple of hundred years. Such mammoth earth—cutting a ditch twelve miles long, a couple of hundred feet deep, and three hundred and sixty wide—was never seen elsewhere in the world; and it is said to have cost the lives of seventy thousand peons, or Indian laborers, in the course of construction. Why this should have been, and how they died—whether by slipping in and