Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/543

 Rh The steamers mentioned were to have been paid a liberal bonus for bringing immigrants into the country. Little can be chronicled on that head. Immigration, in the popular acceptance, has not yet been attracted. A Mormon colony has been established near Galeana, in Chihuahua, preparing a refuge, as it was thought, for escape from the wrath to come. My hopeful friend Owen, with whom I climbed Popocatepetl, has essayed a socialistic experiment at Topolobampo Bay, from which doleful accounts of hardship come back, and lately colonization has been begun at Todos Santos, in Lower California, in which remote quarter something like a "boom" is being attempted. Frequent purchases of vast tracts by Americans in the Northern States are reported. If these be true, more responsible ownership may but serve to fasten upon the Mexican peasants evils from which they long have suffered. Much is said of the sequestration of the church property under the Laws of. Reform, and it was in essence a bold and commendable step, but it neither raised up a middle class nor eased the financial straits of the government. By shiftless mismanagement nearly all the benefit inured to a few shrewd adventurers. There are still no more than five or six thousand proprietors for the whole country.

Mexico has become also, as it by no means used to be, a country of guide-books. The two principal ones of these differ so between themselves and from all others that, in default of a chapter in each on the comparative value of authorities, they have but little satisfaction for the practical inquirer. Thus, one gives the population of Vera Cruz at 20,000, the other at 10,000—my own information, procured from residents on the spot, put it at 17,000, and the last Annuario Mata, a semi-official publication consulted by the commercial classes, gives it at 26,000.