Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/138

136 its own long chapter in the nine hundred pages of this interesting but endless volume. Life on the haciendas, with its private bull-ring, and slow recurring village festas; life in the city, its sole idea of amusement centering about the gambling-table, and the disgraceful orgy of the public ball; life in the home, languid, dull, unoccupied by sense of duty beyond the sluggish routine of domestic affairs, or elevation of purpose save the endeavor to uphold traditions of caste at expense of probity and comfort, all these are delineated with affecting realism. Compared with this picture of customs and manners a century ago, the Mexico of to-day is a land of impetuous progress; but, at the same time, one is surprised to find amid the old-fashioned moralizing of the venerable penitent some of the most approved modern ideas concerning social problems. He declaims against round dancing; he scourges the fashion of wearing mourning graded to express the infinitesimal steps in the passage from deep black grief to pale mauve melancholy; he criticises prison discipline as means of reformation; he castigates the misrule and ignorance of ordinary hospital management. And so through a series of homilies upon affairs