which are graduates respectively of the Springfield (Massachusetts) "Republican" and Boston "Herald." No paper discusses the many and vexatious problems of the Mexican state and its people with greater intelligence; none has a larger measure of the confidence of the Government; and no agency in Mexico is likely to be more influential in the future in promoting the development and prosperity of the country.
The press of Mexico can hardly be said to be free; inasmuch as, when it says anything which the Government assumes to be calculated to excite sedition, the authorities summarily arrest the editor and send him to prison; taking care, however, in all such proceedings, to scrupulously observe what has been enacted to be law. Thus the editor-in-chief of "El Monitor Republicano" has recently (1885) served out a sentence of seven months in the common penitentiary, for his criticisms upon the Government.
Finally, what Mexico is to-day, socially and politically, is the natural and legitimate sequence, and exactly what might have been expected from the artificial conditions which for more than three centuries have been forced upon her; and history has never afforded such a striking, instructive, and pitiful illustration of the effect upon a country and a people, of long-continued absolutism and tyranny
