CHAPTER XX.
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES.
REVIOUS
to the advent of railways, and especially the completion of the Mexican Central, Mexico was a sealed book to the majority of Americans. To take up an abode there at that time, one was as securely bottled, corked and labeled for utter isolation from kindred and friends, as though banished to Kamtchatka or the South Sea Islands.
Without railways, telegraphs and their attendant blessings, Mexico was left to her own internal strife and commotion; the incentives to progress were wanting; while Texas, only across the river, possessing these advantages, has, in an incredibly short period, grown to be one of the foremost States in the Union, basking serenely in the sunlight of an unprecedented prosperity.
Considered geographically and topographically in the great federation of nations, the United States and Mexico should be on better terms, commercially and socially, than any other people. The one is situated mostly within the tropics—in the torrid zone; the other in the temperate; and together they produce all those commodities which are necessary to the comfort and convenience of their respective inhabitants. Their shores are girdled by the same vast water belt, and by nature they were intended to be, the full complement of each other. Mexico can produce enough coffee of every grade to supply the world, to say nothing of her sugar, India-rubber, indigo, dye-woods, vanilla, as well as numerous other articles of prime export. She has also
