Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/86

 good; for it is by them, the rank and file, after all, that these must be supported.

The country might seem, at first sight, the most glorious place for real estate speculation in the world. Real property is not taxed except upon such income as it produces. When not actually producing income, it may be idle indefinitely, and escape scot-free, however much it may enhance in value meanwhile. But there are embarrassing restrictions, devised through fear and jealousy of the foreigner, which make the prospect much less attractive. The traveller of means cannot follow his whim, as he might almost anywhere else in the world, of buying a pretty bit of land or house that attracts him and leaving it, to return to when he will, or do what he please with it.

By the Mexican Civil Code "no foreigner may, without previous permission of the President of the Republic, acquire real estate in the frontier states or territory within twenty leagues of the frontier." And "it is absolutely prohibited to foreigners to acquire rustic or urban property within five leagues of the coast."

This may be well enough, and is aimed principally at the United States, as a way of preventing any gradual encroachments from the borders; but farther, and more important: no foreigner may own real property at all, except on condition of remaining permanently and looking after it. If he be absent from the country for two years, his property may be denounced and entered by the first comer, the same as if it were a mine. He cannot even have an agent in the country to hold it for him. Nor, even should he comply with the rigid condition named, could he then sell it to another foreigner.

The transient foreigner, so far as he is concerned, cannot acquire real estate on any condition,