Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/173

Rh argument for a paper currency based on the credit of the government is the practice of America, whatever be its theory. Mexico has sent out three thousand millions of silver, and is still a silverless country. The Real del Monte mines, as all this group is called, have been known almost from the invasion of Cortez. They have been regularly and valuably worked for over a hundred and fifty years, though with some intermissions, caused by the water getting into the mines.

The most successful operator was Pedro Terreras, a muleteer, who found a shaft about 1762, worked it, and grew so rich that he gave Charles IV. of Spain two vessels of war, and promised him, if he would visit America and Regla, that he should never put foot on the New World, but only on the silver from his mines. He was made Count of Regla, and his family are still among the wealthiest Mexicans. The present yield of the mines is about four millions annually.

We went into an "adit," or passage by which the tram-way drags out the ore. It is the Gautemozin mine, and properly named for the last Aztec emperor, who bravely but vainly sought to keep these riches from the European clutch. It is the richest in the country. A mile or so by mules, careful not to put out your arm and to get too lifted up in your head, and you come to a higher hole in the mountain, and a deeper one also. Here ladders descend for fifteen hundred feet. We take that for granted, climb a hundred feet, and see the steam-engine working in the bowels of the earth. I had heard that this was an English invention. I find it an American discovery. Here we see it growing. It looks strange, this fierce fire in the heart of the mountain, and some of our companions fear it as typical of the place we do not go up to.

These engines everywhere are to draw off the water. They are run by Englishmen entirely. The ore comes up in long iron boxes, is dumped into carts, is divided off in bags, one in ten of which goes to the miner, besides six reals a day. The ore is worth about as much more; a dollar and a half a day is quite a fair day's wages. They search every workman three times as he leaves the