Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/384

370 upon every street and on every block, and you can only escape their importunities while in your own house or hotel, by giving the strictest orders to your servants to exclude them. Many of these beggars are really needy, sick, maimed and helpless; but many others are graceless impostors. There is no public provision for the helpless and deserving poor, and every year the beggars increase in numbers.



The increase of late years has been very great. Only when you say "pardone!" will the street beggars bow and leave you. The numbers of horribly maimed wretches you see on the streets of Mexico is almost incredible.

The absence of anything like the bustle and noise of a northern city, is noticed at once by a stranger in Mexico. Wholesale trade there is next to none at all, and the retail stores are small, and for the most part poorly patronized. You see no drays loaded with goods for the interior, going through the streets as with us, and the cry of the auctioneer is unheard. Mexico is in no sense a commercial or manufacturing city; its productive industries hardly equaling those of a town of a tenth part of its population in the New England States. You hear the voice of the "church going bell," from morning to night, but listen in vain for the note