Chapter XII

CORNOCOPIA

We shall leave the cobbled streets of Tepoztlan, and, boarding if you like one of the sturdy tri-motored planes of the Pan-American line, take a bird's-eye view of the whole nation. To fly from Mexico City to Brownsville, Texas-plateau, mountain ridge at 14,000 feet, the long glissade to the Gulf-is one of the most glorious experiences any human bird can have. In six hours' time, all three empires of the republic pass in review : temperate lands, cold lands, hot lands. We can see cities, unvisited villages, tilled fields, mines, a few factories. How far is Mexico urbanized; how far industrialized; what is the composition of the population? Mexico has been called by no less an authority than Cecil Rhodes the treasure house of the world; others have likened it to a horn of plenty; how true are these glittering observations?

POPULATION

In 1790, the year in which the United States Census Bureau first opened its doors, the population of the young republic and that of Mexico were approximately equal. Each had something less than 5,000,000 souls. By 1840, the United States had grown to twice the size of Mexico. Today she is almost eight times as large, 123,000,000 against 16,000,000. Tannenbaum gives us five sound reasons for Mexico's slower growth:

Restriction of immigration
Feudalism and serfdom
Continuous revolutions
A large proportion of barren soil, partly due to lack of irrigation
A high death-rate

America welcomed the whole world to Ellis Island, confined feudalism to the South, had only one serious revolution-in 1861--possessed almost unlimited areas of flat rich soil, and turned science loose on the problem of public health. While its hundred and sixty-acre homesteads and sprawling cities rolled westward, Mexico stood pat on her haciendas. The clustered huts remained isolated and scattered in gulleys and on mountain sides, the only line of communication a burro path impassable in the rains. The covered wagon and the iron horse creaked and snorted to the north. "The Mexican rural community remained almost completely indifferent to changes in other parts of the world." The basic pattern held.

By 1900, population had crept up to 13,600,000; adding another million and a half by 1910. (No Mexican census of course can be better than a rough approximation. How would a census enumerator (a) ever get to hundreds of remote villages, and (b) escape if he got there?) During the first decade of the revolution, to 1920, population shrank a million persons, to 14,300,000 -due, however, more to Spanish influenza in 1918 than to war and famine. Now, in 1930, it is at the highest point ever recorded, 16,400,000. Applying Tannenbaum's ratios to this total:

Per cent Persons
Free villages (and tribal villages)6o 9,900,000
Hacienda villages 25 4,000,000
Mining villages 2 300,000
Urban and industrial 13 2,200,000
Total I00 16,400,000
Thus eighty-seven per cent of Mexicans live in the country, as contrasted with forty-four per cent of Americans. To state it in another way:
Living in places of Per cent Persons
Less than 100 population 12 2,000,000
100 to 1,000 population 57 9,300,000
Over 1,000 population 31 5,100,000
Total 100 16,400,000

Tepoztlan belongs in the last, and is hence less typical than the middle group, which averages about 300 persons per village. Free villages meanwhile are typically larger than hacienda villages.

Not more than 300,000 Spaniards, according to Paul S. Taylor, ever settled in Mexico, and they were mostly men. History records 15,000 Chinese and 6,000 Negroes-- both races being now excluded. This is literally all the immigration Mexico ever had-- save for the shifting foreign residents and colonists. There were 1,000,000 "whites" in the census of 1790, but the figure refuses to make sense. If only 300,000 whites came in, the bulk of the group must have had Indian blood. The census of 1921 exhibits 1,405,000 "whites," again a ridiculous statement. Few Spaniards have colonized in the last century, with the inevitable genetic result that Indianization is steadily increasing. There must be far less white blood today, both relatively and absolutely, than in 1790. Gruening doubts if there are now as many as 500,000 Mexicans who can properly be called white, say one person out of thirty. The observer travelling about Mexico would agree that this is an outside figure. Ladies, particularly maiden ladies, wreck the purity of American census figures, by reporting their ages at the nearest round number below their actual age. A forty-two will put herself down at forty. Similarly, "white" being the hall-mark of the ruling class, Mexicans are prone to claim that colour, though it flows in halves or quarters or even eighths. And the census man is a tolerant fellow.

Following Gruening and Taylor, I estimate that the present population looks something like this:

Per cent Persons
Indian and mestizo 96 15,700,000
White, not more than 3 500,000
Foreign, not more than 1 200,000
Total 100 16,400,000

To calculate the number of pure Indians in the first group would land a statistician in a hospital for the incurably insane. My guess-a reasonably wild one-would be at least half the total, or something under 8,000,000. Millions with dashes of white blood live and behave like pure Indians, leaving the distinction primarily an academic one. (Biologically Indianization, we must remember, is increasing.) Far more relevant would be an enumeration of those who eat wheat bread against those who eat maize tortillas. This is the real cleavage between the Indian and the white Mexican way of life. The count has never been made, but I should estimate it at one to ten. In the recent cabinet of General Calles, there were eight whites, three mestizos, and one pure Indian.

Two million Indians speak no Spanish, another 2,000,000 speak their own dialect by preference. This gives us some 12,000,000 persons, or seventy-five per cent of all, normally using the official language of the country. At the time of the conquest, 150 dialects were identified in Mexico. Fifty-two are still spoken; fifteen in the state of Oaxaca alone. It is estimated that ninety per cent of the population of Oaxaca is pure Indian. In central and southern Mexico, Indian blood and the Indian languages survive most sturdily. The northern and border states run to mestizo stock. A decade ago, sixty-five per cent of all Mexicans over ten years of age could neither read nor write. This figure will be less today as the little white schoolhouse advances.

NATURAL RESOURCES

If population classifications are dubious, the count of natural resources is even more so. Mexican antipathy for statistics is profound. We do not know how rich the country is, for its assets have never been tabulated properly-or even explored. We do know that these assets are extraordinarily varied, comprising probably a longer list of items than in any equal territory in the world, and we know that some of them have yielded great fortunes in the past. But whatever the final balance sheet, nature has provided two major handicaps to exploitation-jagged mountains and steamy jungles. The former present terrific and often insuperable problems of transportation, the latter a nice problem in keeping alive.

Suppose we select at random two of the thirty-one states for specific examination. Here is Chiapas in the south, and Durango in the north. Chiapas comprises 71,000 square kilometers, bigger than Belgium plus Holland. It is compounded of heaving mountains and fertile valleys in the tierra caliente. Its resources have been little explored. The population is 521,000, nearly all Indian, speaking fourteen languages. Travellers even report that peculiar telepathy, or long-distance language, common among African tribes. The capital is three days on horseback from the nearest railroad. The flora and fauna are innumerable. The economic output includes orchids, indigo, lumber and cabinet woods, copal, fruits, quinine, coffee, sugar, cacao, rice, vanilla, henequen, rubber, cattle, and alligator skins. Craftsmen produce lacquered gourds, and the marimba, an enormous xylophone, requiring sometimes four operators, which is used throughout Mexico. The ruins of Palenque, perhaps the most impressive of all the Maya cities, are within the state's borders, while learned scientists have debated whether Chiapas, rather than the Caucasus, was not the real cradle of the human race. Much of the pre-conquest population committed suicide in preference to being captured by the Spaniards. Once for a time the state abandoned Mexico altogether and combined its government with that of Guatemala.

Durango is in the tier next below the northern border states. Its area is 100,000 square kilometers, more than Portugal's, and its population is 395,000, with a large infiltration of mestizo. The savage tribe which occupied the region at the conquest was driven out in 1554. The country is very mountainous and abounds in game, from grizzly bears down. It grows some cotton and supports a few cotton mills. There are one hundred and twenty mines in the state, producing iron, sulphur, rubies, gold and silver. In a certain district is a mountain, seven hundred feet above the plain, of almost solid iron-six hundred million tons of it. So, if space allowed, we might go from state to state, finding drama, history and nuggets of fabulous wealth. But nuggets do not necessarily make an entire nation rich. Of more importance is the matter of plain dirt. The soil of Mexico leaves much to be desired, as the following figures show:

Millions of acres
Land actually cultivated 30
Pasture land 120
Timber land 44
Desert, waste and unutilized 296
Total area of Mexico 490

Thus only about six per cent of the soil of Mexico is under actual cultivation. How much could be brought under? Dr. Eyler Simpson estimates that ten per cent is possible without irrigation, and another twenty per cent if huge outlays were made for impounding waters. The outside theoretical limit is thus 150,000,000 acres, with perhaps 60,000,000, twice the present area, as the practical limit of cultivation. Mexico can just about feed herself, at the present time. (She is now importing corn from Africa, but this is probably due to abnormal conditions following the Revolution.) By improving her technical methods she could more than feed herself, especially if she also improved her diet, substituting more milk and eggs for the present excessive bulk of cornmeal. If she cultivated every foot of ground that would raise a crop, including a considerable outlay for new irrigation works, she might conceivably support twice the present population, say 32,000,000 people. This is about the limit unless, like England, she turned industrial and traded her manufactured goods for corn and wheat, a most unlikely programme.

There is no great potential wealth in Mexico's soil, save perhaps for a plantation owner here and there. There is still wealth in her forests, but a constructive policy would demand more woods rather than less. The Spaniards denuded the country to make it look like the barren hills of Spain, and brought down the blight of drought. For both soil preservation and moisture, more forests are badly needed. Happily the government is encouraging them. Grazing land is-well, grazing land. Ask your banker about fortunes to be made from that. Deserts are emphatically deserts.

At sundry points under the soil lie pools of petroleum, a black, viscous and disagreeable fluid which causes prospectors to unlimber their Winchesters and bankers to leap from their armchairs. Here lay wealth for Mexico-or at least for somebody-beyond the dreams of avarice. And so, for one dizzy decade, it proved. Then salt water came meandering into the viscous pools, and government restrictions into the financial structure. From a peak of 193,000,000 barrels in 1921, oil production has fallen steadily to 45,000,000 barrels in 1929. Tampico is a city of ghosts. Certainly for the moment this asset moves into the portfolio marked "frozen."

This brings us down-or up-to mountain rocks, and, whimsically enough, more cheerful matters. The mines of Mexico constitute an indubitable asset to any nation; an asset proved, furthermore, by four hundred years of activity. If the hacienda did more than any other institution to modify Indian civilization, the high drama of the colonial epoch was furnished by the hewers of mountain rocks. The Aztecs were competent tunnellers and miners, but the matter never greatly excited their interest. Their attitude towards rare metals was normal rather than pathological. When the use of iron became known to the natives of Central America, "they valued that metal above anything," says Bancroft, "and considered it an excellent bargain when they could obtain a hatchet or a knife for an equal weight of gold." As indeed it was.

Not so the Spaniards. "I came to get gold" was the formula of Cortez. Alas, there was not much gold to get. After the current supply had been lost or stolen or shipped to Spain, it was found that the output obtainable from the known mines was meagre. In some cases the Indians abandoned their workings and out of hostility concealed the location. (I visited an old gold mine in Oaxaca surreptitiously worked by the Zapotecs for two hundred years after the conquest.) Gold is widely distributed in Mexico but infrequently in bonanza quantities.

So the Spaniards turned their attention to silver, ultimately with phenomenal success. Veins of altogether fantastic dimensions were discovered, and, despite the crude technology of the time, yielded their owners incredible riches. The Conde de Regla made a net of 5,000,000 pesos in a short period from his mines at Pachuca. He presented Carlos III with two warships, one carrying 112 guns, and loaned him 1,000,000 pesos (never repaid) besides. A mining grandee in Zacatecas had the street between his house and the church-the chroniclers neglect to state the distance-surfaced with silver bars for the wedding of his daughter. Regla, not to be outdone, repeated the performance for his son's christening, and invited the king of Spain to visit Mexico City, promising to pave the road from Vera Cruz to the capital with bullion for the royal coach. We know how far that is-- some two hundred and fifty miles ! Jose de la Borda left two outstanding landmarks for the modern tourist. From the proceeds of his silver mines in Taxco, he built a great rose-brown cathedral, one of the loveliest in Mexico. When he had lost that fortune and made another, he constructed the famous Borda Gardens in Cuernavaca, at an outlay of 1,000,000 pesos. The curious traveller may still wander about the walls and pools and from their luxuriant disorder reconstruct the grandeur of two hundred years ago. Altogether Borda took nearly 40,000,000 pesos out of the mountains of Mexico.

From 1537 to 1914, the nation dumped 90,000 tons of pure silver, to a value of more than $5,000,000,000, upon the markets of the world. In the first hundred and fifty years of that period, she doubled the world supply. A single nugget weighing 2,750 pounds is said to have been found in Sonora. Mexico's oil declines, but not her silver. The Purisima vein, probably the richest single deposit ever mined anywhere, was discovered as late as 1910. Up in the mountains the wayfarer can hardly remain a day before somebody is showing him ore samples of a new silver strike. Today in China, the going currency is still "a dollar Mex." Indeed the chief difficulty at present is not exhausted mines but too many mines. Silver is falling headlong in world markets, taking Mexico's chief industry down with it. Thus even her most promising asset is today a little tarnished. There remain iron, copper, lead, antimony, graphite, mercury, zinc, precious stones and the pearl fisheries of Lower California. Some of these workings are very prosperous; some of them will undoubtedly prove bonanzas in years to come. But I. heard nothing which tempted me to pawn my personal property and invest.

Of available water power Mexico is said to possess 6,000,000 horsepower. In comparison with the 35,000,000 of the United States this is not a startling exhibit. Water runs in Mexico perhaps faster than anywhere else on earth, but it confines its galloping to the wet season in the summer months. To make power available the year around, huge and very costly storage reservoirs must be constructed. There is utility and some wealth to be gained from the present resource without storage projects, but the margin is hardly one to excite Mr. Samuel Insull.

The inventory is indicated if not complete. Mexico is not a poor country in natural resources like Italy or Norway, but the tale of her riches has been somewhat overtold. To my mind her greatest wealth lies in her scenery, her sunshine, her architecture, and her brown peoplenot as lure for tourist dollars, but for her own life and enjoyment.

MARCH OF THE MACHINES

Mexico introduced the machine into North America early and briskly with the falconets of Cortez. She followed by printing the first book on the continent in 1536, and the first newspaper in 1693. Then she rested on her laurels, and has been resting ever since.

The industrial revolution proper entered the country in 1850 when thirteen kilometers of railway track were laid on the line from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. By 1876, when Diaz came into office, there were 691 kilometers of track; in I9I0, when he fled to Europe, 24,717. In the latter year 33,000 textile operatives were working in 135 factories, and the mines, hand operated for 400 years, were putting in motors, automatic pumps and mechanical conveyors. In the Diaz generation thousands upon thousands of horsepower came marching into Mexico, and if the same rate had been maintained for the last two decades, we might have seen a pretty little industrial exhibit in the nation today. It was not maintained. Industrialization has moved but slowly since Diaz. Electric power and automotive engines show sharp advances; railway mileage, trolley lines, factories, have hardly more than held their own.

In 1926 there were 2,877 manufacturing establishments in the country, employing 95,775 workers, with a total investment of $1,700,000,000. The state of Texas in 1925 had 3,606 factories employing 106,792 workers, not including light and power plants. (Included in Mexican figures.) Mexico with richer resources, three times the area, and three times the population of Texas, is the less industrialized o f the two--not relatively but absolutely. Texas is but one state in the union, and with the highest respect, to regard it as an industrialized area is a quaint conceit. Little Rhode Island has more machinery to show. In the United States, one person in fifteen is working in a factory; in Mexico one person in one hundred and sixty.

Let us enumerate all workers conceivably industrial:

Factory workers 96,000
Miners 70,000
Railroad employees 40,000
Oil workers 8000
Total 214,000

If we added chauffeurs, typists, aviators, motor cops, even machine gunners, everybody who has anything directly to do with machines, we could hardly swell the total to 250,000, or one person in sixty-four. A similar computation for the United States would run something in the order of one person in ten. If the comparison is permissible, one might say that America is more than six times as industrialized, relatively, as Mexico. Out of every hundred men, women and children, one and one half are in Mexican industry; ten in American industry. In the light of these figures the title "machineless men" is not quite so apt for the whole country as it is for Tepoztlan, but it is apt enough.

The principal factory industries and the number of their workers may be shown as follows-the figures are for 1929:

Textiles 49,600 Paper 2,300
Boots and shoes 10,500 Flour milling 2,200
Tobacco 5,500 Soap 1,900
Breweries 3,000
Distilleries 2,900
Tanneries 2,700 Miscellaneous 15,400
Total 96,000

Of factory-made articles, Mexico supplies her own requirements of beer, gasoline and twine-a curious cocktail. All else must be imported in whole or in part. She is far short of cotton cloth, the item so important in the village market. Her only large steel plant, in Monterrey, turns out 100,000 tons a year, where the United States turns out 60,000,000 tons. Monterrey, however, is enlarging its capacity in the teeth of the current depression. The production of electricity has reached 500,000 horsepower, about two thirds of it from falling water. We produce 42,000,000 horsepower, from coal and falling water. There are 60,000 telephones against our 19,000,000; 75,000 motor vehicles against our 30,000,000; 400 miles of stone-surfaced highway against our 625,000 miles. Mexican manufactured goods, like Russian, tend to be notoriously poor in quality. To the beer, however, I can give more than a passing grade.

MARCH OF THE TRADE UNIONS

With an industrial population of only 250,000, labour problems in Mexico sink into relative insignificance, compared with agricultural problems. The rise of the labour movement since 1910, however, has been dramatic, and in a political sense, important; it deserves a word. The first modern labour union was organized by the railroad workers in 1887, but not until 1904 did it attain stability. From the turn of the century, the ideas of Bakunin, Henry George, and French socialism began to filter in. The cotton mill workers tried to organize in 1906, to be promptly shot down by Diaz. Copper mine employees shared the same fate in the same year-curiously the one that followed the great abortive Russian revolution of 1905. A railroad strike in 1908 was squelched with the threat of gunpowder. By this time there were some 16,000 unionists in the country, a negligible number.

Organized labour first became a power after the split between Villa and Carranza in 1915. "Red battalions" of workers saved Carranza's tottering standard. Article 123 of the Constitution of 1917 was their reward-a document to which we shall presently return. At the time it was the most progressive labour code ever drafted by any nation. In addition, Carranza turned over to the unions the management of the telephone and telegraph lines. In 1918, the C. R. O. M. was founded, a sort of Mexican A. F. of L., headed by a cabinet officer, Luis N. Morones. Its membership, including agricultural workers, has run as high as 2,000,000. In 1927, it claimed one minister, eleven of the fifty-eight senators, forty of the 272 deputies in the national chamber, two of the twentynine state governors. From time to time it has controlled the municipal government of Mexico City.

Today the C. R. O. M. is in eclipse, for a number of reasons. The peons have transferred their support-- such as it is-- to the Agrarian Party. The Labourites made many enemies by attempting to destroy independent unions, such as the railroad workers. They created great bitterness among employers by pressing them overhard under the new labour code. More flexibility would have saved both employers' balance sheets and workers' jobs. Finally, and most disastrously, the organization has been run by a small inside group, some of whose members were exceedingly corrupt. The gun-toting politician has wrecked the labour movement as he has done his best to wreck everything else in Mexico. "Today," says Dr. Simpson, "Mexico is without an effective labour organization."

Wages have been rising steadily since 1910, but the cost of living has been rising even faster. Real wages show no appreciable advance and thus run contrary to the curve of real wages in the United States. A study made in the Federal District in 1928 set a necessary minimum wage for a labourer's family of five at 3.36 pesos per day. Actual wages averaged about 1.50 pesos-less than half the required minimum. Undernourishment, on a calory basis, is all too common among industrial and urban workers. In short, labour in Mexico is less important than in the United States; it has, on the whole, a more dignified standing and, until recently, far more political power, but its standard of living is distinctly lower. The movement has won revolutionary status but not much in the way of bread.

On October 1, 1930, in the very trough of the worldwide business depression, the Mexican government reported 87,000 unemployed the country over. This is just a little more than one half of one per cent of the population. On the same day in the United States there were at least 6,000,000 unemployed, or five per cent of the population. These figures measure to a nicety the difference between a handicraft and a mechanized system. Man for man we suffer just ten times as badly from unemployment as does Mexico. We gain when the business curve is up, perhaps; certainly she gains when the curve cascades. A representative of one of the great American mining companies in Mexico told me of discharging 3,000 men from a silver district. The company was worried. Would they have to be fed? Was rioting imminent? The fears were groundless; the next day the 3,000 had disappeared. Investigation showed that they had gone back to the corncribs of their villages.

MARCH OF THE DOLLARS, FRANCS AND POUNDS

Finally let us examine the investments of foreign capital in Mexico, and the gross movement of foreign trade as indices of industrialization. Between 1886 and 1910, Diaz persuaded almost 3,000,000,000 pesos of foreign investment into the country. The bulk of it went into mines and plantations, but a substantial amount was devoted to factories, railroads, light and power companies. In 1912 a rough estimate shows:

American capital $1,058,000,000
British capital 320,000,000
French capital 143,000,000
Other foreign capital 118,000,000
Total $1,639,000,000
Today, after two decades of revolution, the figure has shrunk.

When one enters a hardware store it is highly probable that it is owned by a German; a grocery store by a Spaniard. The overwhelming bulk of the output of the mines, the oil wells, the factories, the power companies, is controlled by foreign capital. Railroads are heavily mortgaged to American and English bondholders. The plain conclusion is that industrialization in Mexico--such as it is--has been taken over by aliens, and is not an affair of native Mexicans. Since the Revolution, however, these alien hands have not had matters altogether their own way; their sometime carefree methods of exploitation have been seriously hindered by new property conceptions, by labour codes, agrarian laws.

In 1873, Mexico was so emphatically an independent economic area that its total foreign trade reached the ridiculous figure of only $25,000,000. Diaz attempted to clamp the nation into the world economic system by raising the total to $250,000,000 in 1910. Today it has advanced further, to $487,000,000 in 1929--$192,000,000 of imports, $295,000,000 of exports. Some fifty-one per cent of the total is with the United States. Imports run heavily to manufactured goods-machines, automobiles, iron and steel, cotton cloth, chemicals; exports run heavily to raw products-silver, lead, zinc, petroleum, coffee, raw cotton, henequen. Only a tiny fraction of goods manufactured in Mexico finds an export market, mostly with other Latin American countries.

We must indeed modify the conception of Mexico as a horn of plenty, brimming with material wealth. As far as evidence is available, it is a country relatively poor in soil; inadequately irrigated; declining in oil production; rich in minerals-for the moment the least profitable variety of minerals; with but the merest beginnings of the paraphernalia of industrialism-an equipment if you please inferior to that of the state of Texas. That there is room for expansion in the latter item goes without saying, but it will have to progress in the face of bitter transportation difficulties, a lethal climate in certain areas, a government policy which has executed a right about face from the come-hither attitude of Porfirio Diaz. Personally I am enchanted with the prospect. It is obvious that the rhythm of Tepoztlan is in no immediate danger, and that the basic pattern may be modified only slowly if at all. The enforced delay, furthermore, should give Mexicans opportunity to contemplate the cavortings of the machine in the nations of the Westparticularly during periods of business depression-and should steel them to admit it only on compulsion of more civilized behaviour.

Meanwhile handicraft economics supplies virtually all fundamental needs of the population, as we have seen in detail. Mass production obviously cannot compete in charm, and probably not in quality, with most Mexican handicrafts. I am convinced, in the teeth of all the doctors of economics, that it cannot always compete in price. Here is a village potter, making let us say five hundred articles a year. What are his costs? Try and find them. His clay and colours came out of the nearby soil, his wheel is beyond the laws of depreciation. He has no interest or insurance, and normally no taxes. He cultivates a milpa for his living, and makes pots for fun in his spare time, thus dispensing with the charge for direct labour. To make matters worse, his expenses of distribution are so involved with the spirit of the fiesta-he goes to market for the amusement he finds there-that they collapse to a practical zero. In short, the fellow has no costs at all; the cash he receives for his pots is so much velvet. (In regional exchange we should in justice allow a small expense account.) He sells a fine bowl for two cents, a great five-foot jar for a dollar, a lovely yellow water bottle for thirty cents. Try to beat that, Mr. Ford! He has no rent, no bookkeeping, no advertising, no spirited salesmanship. The only cost is his own time, and that he gives willingly, often lovingly. Much the same holds true for basketry, sarapes, woodworking, simple ironwork, leather-working, toys, sandals, sombreros, simple furniture, varying with the price of the raw material. The Indian system, for many products, in respect to both quality and cost, has mass production completely whipped.

Mrs. Ralph Borsodi, at Suffern, New York, produces floor wax in her own kitchen, made to Bureau of Standards formula, for $1.50 a gallon. An inferior product, purchased at the store, made with all the alleged economies of quantity production, costs her at least $3.50. She can show you jellies, preserves, canned goods, home produced at a fraction of the going market price, and far superior in quality. Her cost-accounting system, furthermore, would be approved by any certified public accountant who knew his business. Some day the practical men of the machine age will have to face the implications of Mrs. Borsodi's kitchen, and the potteries and looms of Mexico. Mass production has its place, but not necessarily sprawled over the whole bed.

ASSORTED STATISTICS in round numbers
Year
1930 Total population 16,404,000
1930 Population of Mexico City (Federal District) 1,218,000
1930 Area of Mexico-acres 490,000,000
square miles 767,000
1929 Total exports $296000,000
1929 Exports to United States $118,000,000
1929 Total imports $192,000,000
1929 Imports from United States $134,000,000
1929 Government receipts including $161,000,000
1929 import duties $42,000,000
1929 public services $30,000,000
1929 tax on industry $23,000,000
1929 Government disbursements including $138,000,000
1929 war $45,000,000
1929 public works $17,000,000
1929 education $ 14,000,000
1927 Railroad mileage 14,000
1929 Tons of freight carried 10,000,000
1929 Passengers carried 16,000,000
1930 Federal surfaced highways--miles 850
193o Budget for federal highways $ 7,000,000
1930 Motor vehicles in Mexico 75,000
1929 Gasoline consumption, gallons 68,000,000
1926 Telegraph lines, miles 84,000
1928 Paid telegrams sent 3,700,000
1928 Free telegrams sent (official, etc.) 1,300,000
1930 Number of telephones 60,000
1929 Post office pieces handled, domestic 130,000,000
1929 " " " " foreign 62,000,000
1929 Insurance in force (mostly fire) $684,000,000
1928 Corn production, metric tons 2,079,000
1928 Wheat " " " 324,000
1928 Bean production, metric tons 195,000
1930 Sugar " " " 198,000
1928 Henequen " " " 133,000
1926 Number of cattle 5,600,000
1929 Silver production, kilograms 3,381,000
1929 Gold " " 19,000
1929 Lead " " 248,700,000
1929 Copper " " 86,500,000
1929 Zinc " " 174,050,000
1929 Mercury " " 82,000
1929 Oil " barrels 45,000,000
1926 Electric horsepower capacity 464,000
193o Estimated foreign capital $1,500,000,000
1930 " U. S. capital including bonds $1000,000,000
1928 Number of schools 17,923

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