Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/468

452 Congress recently decreed instant execution, without any formal trial, to any one caught in the act of wrecking or robbing a train. That any improved methods of intercommunication between different people or countries—common roads, vessels, railroads, or vehicles, or the like—increase the production and exchange of commodities, is accepted as an economic axiom. But there could be no more striking and practical illustration of this law, than a little recent experience on the line of the Mexican National Railroad. The corn-crop, which is the main reliance of the people living along the present southern extension of this road for food, had for several years prior to 1885 failed by reason of drought; and, under ordinary circumstances, great suffering through starvation would inevitably have ensued. The natives, however, soon learned that with the railroad had come a ready market, at from two and a half to three cents per pound, for the fiber known as "ixtle"; the product of a species of agave, which grows in great abundance in the mountainous regions of their section of country, and which has recently come into extensive use in Europe and the United States for the manufacture of brushes, ladies' corsets, mats, cordage, etc. And so well have they improved their knowledge and opportunities, that the quantity of ixtle transported by the Mexican National Railroad has risen from 224,788 pounds in 1882 to 700,341 in 1883; to 3,498,407 in 1884; and 3,531,195 in the first seven months of 1885; while with the money proceeds, the producers have been able to buy more corn from Texas than they would have obtained had their crops been successful, and have had, in addition, and probably for the first time in their lives, some surplus cash to expend for other purposes. What sort of things these poor Mexican people would buy if they could, was indicated to the writer by seeing in the hut of a laborer, on the line of the Mexican Central Railroad—a place destitute of almost every comfort, or article of furniture or convenience—a bright, new, small kerosene-lamp, than which nothing that fell under his observation in Mexico, was more remarkable and interesting. Remarkable and interesting, because neither this man nor his father, possibly since the world to them began, had ever before known anything better than a blazing brand as a method for illumination at night; and had never had either the knowledge, the desire, or the means of obtaining anything superior. But at last, through contact with and employment on the American railroad, the desire, the opportunity, the means to purchase, and the knowledge of the simple mechanism of the lamp, had come to this humble, isolated Mexican peasant; and, out of the germ of progress thus spontaneously, as it were, developed by the wayside, may come influences more potent for civilization and the elevation of humanity in Mexico, than all that church and state have been able to effect within the last three centuries.

The projection and extension of the American system of railroads into Mexico commanded the almost universal approval of the people