Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/317

Rh —No more striking illustration of the popular "craze" for public office can be found than in the circumstance that, although an appointment to the United States consulate at Vera Cruz (salary in 1884, $3,000) is equivalent to investing in a lottery of death, in which the chances to an unacclimated person for drawing a capital prize are probably as great as one to seven or eight, no lack of applicants for the place is ever experienced. Thus, the consul whose appeal for an increase of salary is above noticed, was appointed from Illinois, and resigned in 1881. His successor, appointed from Nebraska, died of yellow fever a fortnight after arrival at his post; and since then there have been two appointments, one from Nebraska and one from New Jersey.]

This, then, is what the writer has to report respecting the economic condition and prospects of Mexico. His conclusions have not come to him, as perhaps may be inferred or charged, mainly from a somewhat extended but brief tour of observation; for no one can be more conscious than he of how little one can know of a country who, ignorant of the language, the customs, the political and social condition and pursuits of its people, sees it simply and hurriedly as a traveler. But the journey in question was, nevertheless, sufficiently extensive and instructive to thoroughly satisfy at least as to two points: First, that here was a country, bordering on the United States for a distance of more than two thousand miles, which was almost as foreign to the latter, in respect to race, climate, government, manners, and laws, as though it belonged to another planet; and, secondly, that the people of the United States generally knew about as much of the domestic concerns of this one of their nearest neighbors as they did about those of the empire of China. The temptation to enter upon a field of economic investigation so fresh and so little worked was too attractive to be resisted; and, accordingly, with the sole purpose of desiring to know the truth about Mexico, and to form an opinion as to what should be the future political and commercial relations between that country and the United States, the writer has made a careful study of a large amount of information that he has found accessible, both from public and private sources. And it is on the basis of this study, and with the kindliest feeling for and the deepest interest in Mexico, that he has written. In so doing, however, he claims nothing of infallibility. He frankly confesses that in respect to some things he may be mistaken; and that others might draw entirely different conclusions from the same data. But for the entire accuracy