is day in Mexico as in Spain, where two thousand
years have not superseded its use or even altered it. Against these
improvements we must set a heavy account of injury done to the country
as regards its cultivation. The Conquest cost the lives of several
hundred thousand of the labouring class; and numbers more were taken
away from the cultivation of the land to work as slaves for the
conquerors in building houses and churches, and in the silver-mines.
When the inhabitants were taken away, the ground went out of
cultivation, and much of it has relapsed into desert. Even before the
Conquest, Mexico had been suffering for many years from incessant wars,
in which not only thousands perished on the field of battle, but the
prisoners sacrificed annually were to be counted by thousands more,
while famine carried off the women and children whose husbands and
fathers had perished. But the slaughter and famine of the first years
of the Spanish Conquest far exceeded anything that the country had
suffered before.

At the time of the Conquest of Mexico the Spaniards let the native
irrigating-works fall into decay; and they took still more active
measures to deprive the land of its necessary water, by their
indiscriminate destruction of the forests on the hills that surround
the plains. When the trees were cut down, the undergrowth soon
perished, and the soil which had served to check the descending waters
in their course was soon swept away. During the four rainy months, each
heavy shower sends down a flood along the torrent-bed which flows into
a river, and so into the ocean, or, as in the Mexican valley, into a
salt lake, where it only serves to injure the surrounding land. In both
cases it runs away in utter waste.

In later years the Spanish owners of the soil had the necessity of the
system impressed upon them by force of circumstances; and large sums
were spent upon the construction of irrigating channels, even in the
outlying states of the North.

In the American territory recently acquired from Mexico history has
repeated itself in a most curious way. We learn from Froebel, the
German traveller, that the new American settlers did not take kindly to
the system of irrigation which they found at work in the country. They
were not used to it, and it interfered with their ideas of liberty by
placing restrictions upon their doing what they pleased on their own
land. So they actually allowed many of the water-canals to fall int