ado, the hill of iron,
still remains one of the wonders of Mexico.

The long years of the struggle for throwing off the dominions of Spain
wrought a great change in Mexican mining, and even when independence
was accomplished, the warring revolutionary factions of a country
divided against itself destroyed all sense of security, alienated the
labour, and so mining fell into disuse, and the mines into ruins. The
history of the great Guanajuato silver mines is typical of the effect
political conditions exercised upon this industry. The great output of
silver from the Valenciana mine--300 million dollars during the last
half of the eighteenth century--fell, after the first decade of the
nineteenth, to insignificant proportions. The city was attacked in
1810, when in the zenith of her production, by the revolutionary army
of the Republicans under Hidalgo, the famous instigator of
independence. Sanguinary struggles took place in the city, which fell,
and with it the mining industry. Work was stopped; the waters flooded
the shafts and galleries, general lawlessness took the place of order,
and bands of armed robbers helped themselves at will to the silver, and
made forced loans upon the community. Indeed, at the great mining
centres throughout the country, Mexican mine buildings resemble
fortifications rather than the structures of a peaceable industry;
those which were constructed during those turbulent times. Battlemented
walls and loopholes give some of these places the appearance of the
stronghold of robber barons of the Middle Ages, and remind the
traveller, under the peaceful _regime_ of to-day, how rapid has been
the country's progress.

The troubled times of Iturbide followed, and mining operations
practically ceased. The Indians at this period became unruly in some
districts, due to the withdrawal of the Spanish soldiers who protected
the mining communities; and in Sonora, one of the busiest of the mining
states, a great uprising of the savage Apaches in 1825 caused the
abandoning of towns and industries and the inauguration of a long
period of ruin and bloodshed. In 1824 something of a revival had begun,
by the operations of English capitalists in the great silver-producing
centres of Real del Monte, at Pachuca, as already mentioned, and at
Guanajuato. The history of this period at Real del Monte is a
remarkable one, not yet forgotten, and the lavish outlay of funds made
by the London company in Mexico and the extr