Mexico is one of the countries in which the contrast between great riches and great poverty is most striking.  No traveller ever enters the country without making this remark.  The mass of the people are hardly even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes can scarcely be matched in England or Russia.  Yet this state of things has not produced a permanent aristocracy.

The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous regularity.  Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting, often make colossal fortunes.  Miners have made the greatest sums, and made them most rapidly.  Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the last century.  They never seem to have lasted many years.  Before the Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty by the third or fourth generation.

Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual disorders that prevail.  In the mining-districts most men make money at some time or other.  The difficulty lies in keeping it.  There seems to be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine.  A good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops in his till.  Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has a share of the profits, and when there is a “good thing” going, he is on the spot to profit by it.

When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable ways of employing his money.  Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to manage them; and discounting merchants’ bills is a lucrative business.  But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for orders to pass goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial transactions familiar to those who know the shifts and mystifications of that astonishing institution, the Finance-department of Mexico.

We rode from Puebla to Orizaba.  Amozoque, the first town on the road, is a famous place for spurs, and we bought some.  They are of blue steel inlaid with strips of silver, and the rowel is a sort of cogged wheel, from an inch and a half to three inches in diameter. (See page 220.) They look terrific instruments, but really the cogs or points of the rowels are quite blunt, and they keep the horse going less by hurting him than by their incessant jingling,