from the United States; and smart, capable-looking men from New York,
or more generally from Chicago, or Kansas City, or St. Louis, or other
great commercial centres of the middle west, have set up numerous
offices and enterprises. They have brought a good deal of wealth into
the country, in the form of capital invested in mines and railways, and
Mexico has welcomed her _primos_, or cousins from the North, both for
their gold and for their spirit of enterprise. The class of American
business-man who goes to Mexico has much improved of late years; and
these _hijos del Tio Samuel_, "sons of Uncle Sam," as the Mexicans
sometimes jocularly dub them, are more representative of their country
than the doubtful element of a few years since. The junction of these
two tides of humanity which roll together but never mingle--the
Americans and the Mexicans--affords much matter for interesting
observation. The American influence on Mexican civilisation is partly
good, partly bad, but it cannot yet be considered more than a drop in
the ocean of change in the deep-seated Spanish individuality of the
Mexican people.

To sum up a mental impression of Mexico City, there rise before us the
old and the new on the threshold of change; the antique, the quaint,
and the refined, pressed close by the modern, the commercial, and the
cheap: the hand of a haughty Castilian hidalgo-spirit held forth to the
"cute" and business Yankee. But there is a great breach yet between the
Chicago "drummer," or the American land-shark; and the Mexican
gentleman. Here is a rich and developing soil, with--perhaps--some
benefit for the masses: a new civilisation in the making; a new people
being fashioned from an old; a plutocratic bulk trailing off into a
mass of white and red-clothed poor _peones_ and swarthy Indians.
Beautiful women, _serenatas_, bull-fights, courtesy, azure sky--all
have inscribed upon the traveller's mind a pleasing and semi-romantic
impression, a _conjunto_, whose interest and attraction, with perchance
a regretful note, time does not easily dispel.

CHAPTER XI
MEXICAN LIFE AND TRAVEL

Travel and description--Mexican cities--Guadalajara--Lake Chapala--
Falls of Juanacatlan--The Pacific slope--Colima--Puebla--Cities of the
Great Plateau--Guanajuato--Chihuahua--The Apaches--The _peones_--
Comparison with Americans--_Peon_ labour system--Mode of living--Houses
of the _peon_ class--Diet--_Tortillas_ and _frijoles_--Chilli--
_Pulque_--