Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/215

Rh are the basis of the pulque industry of Mexico—at once a large item in its agricultural wealth, and one of the greatest curses to its peon population, many of whom are kept in poverty and sottishness through it.

A philosophical historian notes that man has never remained content with water as a beverage, and that agriculture, affording a means of obtaining abundant intoxicants as one possible and alluring substitute, has borne the curse of drunkenness in all ages. The discoverers of the new world found the cultivation of the maguey or metl, and the production of a fermented drink, 'octli' or 'pulque' from its sap,

an established industry, which even then had worked its fatal course with the Toltec race.

The present traffic in pulque is large. Something over five million barrels of it are used in the Mexican republic every year, of which quantity about half is consumed in the capital city and much of the remainder in Puebla and the other large cities of the central plateau. Cheap as it is, for it sells for from one to three cents of Mexican money for a large glass, its aggregate value amounts to several million dollars gold, a year. Special trains are run into the City of Mexico every morning for its delivery, as is done with the milk supply of our own cities.