Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/743

Rh exploration for the construction of a standard work of travel; yet, whoever reads his narrative and enters into sympathy with the author (as who in reading Bayard Taylor does not?) is heartily glad that it is no longer—for Mungo Park in attempting to explore the Niger, or Bruce in seeking for the sources of the Nile, or Livingstone on the Zambesi, never encountered greater perils or chronicled more disagreeable experiences of travel. It was not enough to have "journeyed," as he expresses it, "for leagues in the burning sun, over scorched hills, without water or refreshing verdure, suffering greatly from thirst, until I found a little muddy water at the bottom of a hole"; to have lived on frijoles and tortillas (the latter so compounded with red pepper that, it is said, neither vultures nor wolves will ever touch a dead Mexican), and to have found an adequate supply of even these at times very difficult to obtain; to sleep without shelter or upon the dirt floors of adobe huts, or upon scaffolds of poles, and to have even such scant luxuries impaired by the invasions of hogs, menace of ferocious dogs, and by other enemies "without and within," in the shape of swarms of fleas, mosquitoes, and other vermin; but, in addition to all this, he was robbed, and left bound and helpless in a lonely valley, if not with the expectation, at least with a feeling of complete indifference, on the part of his ruffianly assailant*, as to whether he perished by hunger and cold, or effected a chance deliverance. And if any one were to travel to-day over the same route that Bayard Taylor followed, and under the same circumstances of personal exposure, he would undoubtedly be subject to a like experience. In August, 1878, Hon. John W. Foster, then United States minister to Mexico, writing from the city of Mexico to the Manufacturers' Association of the Northwest, at Chicago, made the following statement concerning the social condition of the country at that time: "Not a single passenger-train leaves this city (Mexico) or Vera Cruz, the (then) termini of the only completed railroad in the country, without being escorted by a company of soldiers to protect it from assault and robbery. The manufacturers of this city, who own factories in the valley within sight of it, in sending out money to pay the weekly wages of their operatives, always accompany it with an armed guard; and it has repeatedly occurred, during the past twelve months (1878), that the street railway-cars from this city to the suburban villages have been seized by bands of robbers and the money of the manufacturers stolen. Every mining company which sends its metal to this city to be coined or shipped abroad always accompanies it by a strong guard of picked men; and the planters and others who send money or valuables out of the city do likewise. The principal highways over which the diligence lines pass are constantly patroled by the armed rural guard or the Federal troops; and yet highway robbery is BO common that it is rarely even noticed in the newspapers. One of the commercial indications of the insecurity of communication between