The grandees of Spain came out to rule this diversified land, and they did not disdain to make it their home. Spain gave it of her best often, with capable legislators, laws; the Ley de Indias, enacted for the benefit of the colonies, and erudite professors and devout—over-devout—ecclesiastics; and these often carried out their work with patriotism and fervency. Although it is not yet, the student of history will be fain to think that out of this seed a good growth must in the future come to being, and this we may say without any unnecessary apologetics for Mexico.
But what, we may ask, is the influence here, that throws back this fruitful land from time to time to anarchy, and makes its name a byword?
Disorder and treachery periodically arises, dictator succeeds dictator, revolution follows revolution, and the country's soil, whether in the streets of its capital, whether upon its desert plains or in its tropic valleys, is drenched with the blood of its own sons. The results of thirty years of a constructive national policy which Diaz gave, the hopes and pretensions of a high civilization, laboriously built up, sink down to nought, revert to the conditions of that dreadful half-century that followed upon Independence, from which stand forth the names—noble and ignoble—of Iturbide, Maximilian, Juarez, or Morelos. What ails this strange land? Is it capable of no better life?
In reply, Mexico is a land following the inevitable law of reaping what it has sown, and both the sowing and the reaping are but exaggerated forms of processes that are affecting the world at large. Judgment must not be too heavily passed upon Mexico as a whole, for, as I shall later show, a whole nation must not be condemned by reason of some of its nationals.
Mexico, like all Spanish American States, is at the mercy, politically and economically, of certain small sections of the people. Government is of an oligarchy in normal times, which often abuses its position. The bulk of the people have neither art nor part in their own governance. The ballot box is too often a delusion and a snare. A turbulent or ambitious element can seize power at any moment by a golpe de estado (a coup d'état). The upper and refined class, which, be it said, is the equivalent of and as well-informed often as that in Europe, stand aloof from political revolution and disturbance, and would be the last to commit the excesses which bring execration upon the country's name. The educated Mexican has all the traditions of the caballero, the gentleman; the Mexican lady is refined, devout, delicate and tenderhearted. The peon and the Indian are not turbulent, but well-meaning and generally industrious.
These matters we shall further consider; for the moment let us pass on to survey the land itself, to traverse its wide and diversified surface, with its many elements of beauty, interest and utility.
Here, then, is a land of vast extent, in which various European countries could be contained; stretching from the borders of Central America northward to those of the United States, two thousand miles long upon its major axis, shaped upon the map like a cornucopia, washed on one side by the Atlantic, on the other by the Pacific, and containing within itself every resource of Nature which could make for plenty and progress. Its southern half lies within the Tropics, but consisting in great part of an elevated tableland, where the diurnal range of temperature—from the heat of the day to the cold of the night—is so considerable that latitude we find is not a reliable guide to climate.
This great plateau, whose escarpments, viewed as we approach from either side present the appearance of mountains, is in large part sterile, treeless, and without rivers of importance or navigability. But it is crossed by ranges of steely-blue hills and intersected by fertile valleys, where agriculture is carried on under irrigation—an ancient art by means of canals fed from the intermittent streams. Cacti, strange and gaunt, clothe it by nature, but there are large coniferous forests upon the mountain slopes in places.
Do we approach the country from the north, by the railway lines from the United States border, we traverse deserts among the most dreadful of the New World, deserts yet with a certain cruel beauty of their own, where once the Apache roamed—cruellest and most horrible of all the world's savage folk.