A miller in Mexico has to pay thirty-two separate taxes on his wheat, from the time it leaves his field till he can offer it to his customers as flour. The country swarms with officials who collect taxes from every conceivable source, fandangos, christenings, marriages, funerals, buryings, etc., while you live, and then collect taxes on your grave after you are dead. It is very much like a case I knew in Texas when a man was sentenced to prison for life, and the judge found that he had overlooked one indictment, so he promptly added ten years. I am puzzled to know if this taxation gave rise to the belief in the transmigration of souls, or whether the belief in transmigration gave the cue to the officials to collect from the shades. Perhaps this delinquent tax is charged to the estate of Purgatory et al. Every man between the ages of 18 and 66 is taxed for the privilege of living, and the only way to escape this tax is to live in Vera Cruz and die young. Poor old Mexico.
I might devote ten pages to this subject, but what is the use? A country with such a prohibitive tariff shuts out her only source of revenue on imports, and exports nothing of importance but money, so how can she survive except by robbing the people? The country is very poor, the State of South Carolina producing two and a half times as much as the entire northern half of Mexico, and if you compare them by proportionate areas, twenty-five times as much. The interminable system of taxation is the most despicable system on American soil.
I have at last discovered why so many beggars go naked in Mexico. They go naked and beg in order to escape the tax gatherer, since a man is taxed on clothes and material and upon all incomes greater than $150. History tells of a certain people that brought on a revolution and a republic, just on account of such harmless pastime as licking stamps. The time will come in Mexico when the people will lick just one stamp too many, then they will rise in their might and stamp the industry in the ground. (Joke not intended).
CHAPTER XXII.
PREHISTORIC RUINS.
“Thou unrelenting Past!
Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain—
And fetters strong and fast,
Hold all within thy unbreathing reign.
“Far in thy realm withdrawn,
Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom;
And glorious ages gone,
Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.
“Full many a mighty name
Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevealed;
With thee are silent fame,
Forgotten arts, and wisdom disappeared.”
WHAT strange people first entered this land? Who built these stupendous monuments? Whence did they come and whither did they go? And what characters are these engraved on walls which no man can read? And what catastrophe removed from the continent every single inhabitant of a gifted race? And why do we strive so hard to lift the veil which for so long has guarded these strange portals?