Yucatan, perhaps the most polished traders in the world, reside for the most part at Merida, the capital of the province, and leave the conduct of their estates to major-domos and overseers; and if accounts reach them regarding cruelties perpetrated by these brutes upon the helpless Indians who labour on their estates, they certainly do not take much notice of them. Why, indeed, should a mere Indian come between the wind and their nobility? They seem to forget that the men of the race they now enslave were once lords of the soil themselves and the most cultivated people on the American continent, having a civilisation beside which the shabby-gentility of upstart Merida is a very tinsel affair indeed. I never encounter the phrase "Viva Mexico!" but I mutter to myself "Viva los Indios!" But to return to the facts and figures of the hennequen trade, nearly £30,000,000 worth of hennequen has been exported since 1887, and the annual amount netted from its shipment abroad averages between £2,000,000 and £3,000,000 a year. Yucatan is, of course, a poor country, waterless and almost desert in places, and it is pleaded that hennequen is its only industry. Not so, for there is a much more important traffic—the traffic in bodies and souls. Sufficient has been said elsewhere regarding the Mexican's love of fruit-cultivation, but it may be as well to state that within recent years several large companies have been promoted with the object of growing fruit on a large scale within the Republic. Thus bananas, oranges, grapes, nuts, figs, and pineapples are extensively grown. But Mexican fruit, though decidedly luscious in appearance, has but little or no flavour in some districts. In others, however, it is all that can be desired, and luckily the desirable variety is much more plentiful.
After the example of the late rubber boom, writers on the subject must observe a proper economy of Rubber. language in respect to this variable vegetable, if such it can be called with propriety; and I am not going to say anything here which will make the
