lated blocks which have no public water whatsoever, neither for sewer flushing nor for drinking.
It will take a few minutes' reflection to realize what this really means. As a result of such unsanitary conditions the death rate in that city ranges always between 5 and 6 per cent, usually nearer the latter figure, which places that percentage at more than double the death rate of well-regulated cities of Europe, the United States and even of South America. Which proves that half the people who die in Diaz's metropolis die of causes which modern cities have abolished.
A life-long resident once estimated to me that 200,000 people of the country's metropolis, or two-fifths the entire population, spend every night on the stones. "On the stones" means not on the streets, for sleeping is not permitted on the streets or in the parks, but on the floors of cheap tenements or lodging houses.
Possibly this is an exaggeration. From my own observations, however, I know that 100,000 would be a very conservative estimate. And at least 25,000 pass the nights in mesones—the name commonly applied to the cheapest class of transient lodging houses.
A meson is a pit of such misery as is surpassed only by the galeras, the sleeping jails, of the contract slaves of the hot lands—and the dormitories of the Mexican prisons. The chief difference between the mesones and the galeras is that into the latter the slaves are driven, tottering from overwork, semi-starvation and fever—driven with whips and locked in when they are there; while to the mesones the ragged, ill-nourished wretches from the city's streets come to buy with three precious copper centavos a brief and scanty shelter—a bare spot to lie down in, a grass mat, company with the vermin that squalor breeds, rest in a sickening room with hundreds
