week of seventy-two hours; spinners, three dollars ditto. In the cotton-mills in the vicinity of the city of Mexico a much higher average is reported. The operatives in the woolen manufactories of Mexico are in receipt of higher average wages than those in almost any other domestic industry; and Mexican woolen fabrics are comparatively cheap and of good style and quality. Underground miners, at the great mines of Zacatecas and Guanajuato, receive an average of nine dollars per week of sixty hours; underground laborers, three dollars ditto.
The wages of common or agricultural laborers vary greatly according to their nationality, location, and character of employment. The Indian agriculturist rarely achieves more than a meager and miserable support for himself and his family, with possibly a little surplus to pay his taxes to the State and his dues to the Church.[1] Accord-
- ↑ "Bernal Diaz, the companion of Cortes, who writes so graphically of ancient Mexico, assures us that the market-place of the original city did not greatly differ from what we see to-day—the chief change being that now no male and female slaves are on sale. The fruits of the soil and the results of individual labor have been repeating themselves for hundreds of years. Men have died, but others do the same thing from generation to generation. Here as impressively as anywhere in Mexico appears the tireless and mechanical iteration that marks the Indian as an unprogressive human animal, and shows him to be in lower life the same child of nature as the uneducated negro of the Southern States of the United States; The Aztec sold fowls, game, vegetables, fruits, articles of food ready dressed, bread, honey, and sweet pastry, when Diaz saw him—and he does the same to-day. There is no more organi-
