Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/170

158 for 1882 was estimated at 12,500,000 bushels, or at the rate of about 1 bushel per capita; while for the year 1885, with a very deficient crop, the wheat product of the United States was in excess of six bushels per capita. Mexican coffee is as good as, and probably better than, the coffee of Brazil, and yet Mexico in 1883-84 exported coffee to all countries to the value of only $1,717,190, while the value of the exports of coffee from Brazil to the United States alone, for the year 1885, was in excess of $30,000,000. Much has also been said of the wonderful adaptation of a great part of the territory of Mexico for the production of sugar, and everything that has been claimed may be conceded; but, at the same time, sugar is not at present either produced or consumed in comparatively large quantities in Mexico, and, in common with coffee—another natural product of the country—is regarded rather as a luxury than as an essential article of food. Thus the sugar product of Mexico for the year 1877-'78, the latest year for which data are readily accessible, amounted to only 154,549,662 pounds. Assuming the product for the present year (1886) to be as great as 200,000,000 pounds, this would give a Mexican per capita consumption of only twenty pounds as compared with a similar present consumption in the United States of nearly fifty pounds. The further circumstance that Mexico at the present time imports more sugar than it exports; and that the price of sugar in Mexico is from two to four times as great as the average for the United States—coarse-grained, brownish-white, unrefined sugar retailing in the city of Mexico for twelve and a half cents a pound (with coffee at twenty-five cents)—is also conclusive on this point. With the present very poor outlook for the producers of cane-sugars in all parts of the world, owing mainly to the bounty stimulus offered by the governments of Europe for the production of beet-sugar; and the further fact that the only hope for the former is in the use of the most improved machinery, and the making of nothing but the best sugars at the point of cane production, the idea so frequently brought forward that labor and capital are likely to find their way soon into the hot, unhealthy coast-lands of Mexico, in preference to Cuba and South America, and that the country is to be speedily and greatly profited by her natural sugar resources, has little of foundation. And, as additional evidence on these matters, the writer would here mention, that a statement has come to him from a gentleman who has been long connected and thoroughly acquainted with the Vera Cruz and City of Mexico Railroad, which runs through the best sugar and coffee territory of the country, that not a single acre of land more is now under cultivation along its line than there was at the time the road was completed, thirteen years ago.

Whatever, therefore, may be the natural capabilities of Mexico for agriculture, they are certainly for the future rather than of the present.

Manufactures.—Apart from handicrafts there is very little of manufacturing, in the sense of using labor-saving machinery, in