When an orderly and firm government shall have been established, Mexico will be refreshed continually by the energizing blood of a hardy, industrious and enterprising white race from beyond the sea. Germany will send her sons and daughters; Ireland, France, England, Italy and Spain will contribute theirs. The various nations, mingling slowly by marriage with the white Mexicans, will amalgamate and neutralize each other into homogeneous nationality. Mexico may thus gradually congregate a People. The language of the country will, in all likelihood, be preserved; for the white natives who now speak Spanish will of course form, for many years, the bulk of the population, and when they die, their offspring and the offspring of the emigrants will know but one tongue. There will thus be no violent extirpation of races; but a slow and genial modification. Modern inventions, arts, tastes, science, emulation, new forms of thought, new modes of development, will be introduced and implanted by these emigrants. The million of white men, and the two millions of mestizos, will become more prosperous under the increased trade and industry of the nation. A good government will be ensured, for the hardy emigrants fly from the political oppression and poverty of the old world to enjoy peaceful liberty in this.
There is nothing in this scheme of progress to which a good man or a republican can object, and if Mexico is sincere in her professions of democracy, and not merely anxious to preserve intact the fragments of a ruined Spanish colony, without a people and without nationality, she will imitate the example of the United States and welcome to her vallies and mountains all who are willing to approach her in the name of order, labor, and liberty. But if she stubbornly adheres to her stupid self-seclusion, and bars the portals of her splendid empire with the revolutionary impediments that are annually scattered over the republic, she will break the beautiful promise given to humanity in the success of her revolution;
"Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished,
As if a morning in June with all its music and sunshine,
Suddenly paused in the sky, and fading slowly descended
Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen!"
Longfellow's Evangeline.
B O O K V.
THE MEXICAN STATES AND TERRITORIES;
THEIR GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS, CITIES, TOWNS,
PRODUCTIONS, MINES, GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS,
ANTIQUITIES, Etc.
CHAPTER I.
DIVISION OF MEXICO INTO STATES—EASTERN, WESTERN, INTERIOR. YUCATAN—BOUNDARIES, DEPARTMENTS, POPULATION, DISTRICTS, TOWNS, PARISHES, PRODUCTIONS, PRINCIPAL TOWNS, ISLANDS, HARBORS.—CHIAPAS—BOUNDARIES, PRODUCTS, DEPARTMENTS, TOWNS, RIVERS, POPULATION—REMAINS IN YUCATAN AND CHIAPAS.—DISCOVERIES OF STEPHENS, CATHERWOOD, NORMAN, ETC.—PALENQUE—UXMAL—YUCATAN CALENDAR.—YUCATAN, CHIAPAN, MECHOACAN, NICARAGUA AND MEXICAN MONTHS.—YUCATESE AND CHIAPAN CYCLE.—YUCATESE AND MEXICAN SOLAR YEAR—DIFFERENCES.—YUCATESE MONTHS.—TABASCO—BOUNDARIES, RIVERS, LAGUNE, INHABITANTS, PRODUCTIONS, TOWNS AND VILLAGES.
IN treating this branch of our subject we have followed the order adopted by Mühlenpfordt in his "Republik Mejico," and acknowledge the important assistance we have derived from the careful, minute and laborious personal researches made by that industrious German author relative to the geography of Mexico. Since the publication of his volumes, in which he had been greatly aided by the previous works of Humboldt, Ward, Burkhardt and other explorers during the present century, the Mexican government has organized a Statistical Commission, whose investigations have been published in a series of Bulletins, and to these we are indebted for recent authentic information about some of the most interesting portions of Mexico. The northern regions, meanwhile, have been illustrated by the explorations of Frémont, Abert, Emory, Wislizenius, Cooke, Simpson, and other officers of the American Government; but as most of the territory examined by them has become the property of the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe, their labors are not of importance in describing the Republic of Mexico as at present bounded. In the last Book of this work, however, which we have devoted to the consideration of California and New Mexico, we shall recur to those brave and scientific explorers of a remote region, so recently a wilderness, but which their labors, and the combined fortune of war and mineral wealth have subdued for the benefit of mankind.