capital, or the engineering knowledge required. Whatever wealth was taken out of them by the foreigners would never have been accessible to the Mexicans. The employment of tens of thousands of natives and the distribution of much money in the form of wages, cost of food stuffs, and so forth, represented just so much economic value which would never have been acquired save for the investment of foreign capital and intelligence.
Any one who may be inclined to doubt the possibility of the exhaustion of easily worked gold and silver mines in Mexico during the three hundred years of Spanish rule will find the history of gold mining in California enlightening. A pamphlet issued by the California State Mining Bureau entitled "California Mineral Production for 1915" contains a very carefully compiled table showing the annual gold production of that state from the time of the discovery of gold by Marshall in 1848, to and including the year 1915. That table shows that the total production for the sixty-eight years amounted to the enormous value of $1,631,183,696. The precious metal, it will be borne in mind, was first found in large placer deposits easily accessible by primitive methods of mining. The production in 1848, the year of the discovery of gold, amounted to $245,301. The annual production increased so
