chinery, used in the United States. This latter development should have been of peculiar economic value to Mexico, for, in addition to producing a large amount of permanent taxable values for the country and giving employment to many of the common labourers at wages in excess of anything they had ever received from native land-owners, they furnished a constant example to the people of modern methods of land cultivation which in time should, and doubtless would, have benefited that larger part of the population engaged in agriculture.
A most important development of foreign land-ownership has been brought about in the last twenty years by the investment of foreign capital, principally from the United States, in great reclamation projects. Comprehensive and costly systems of irrigation have made arid lands, previously of no economic value, very productive. An example of this may be found in the vicinity of Torreon, where English and American capital utilized the waters of a river in irrigating many thousands of acres of land formerly arid that for some years past have produced large and valuable crops of cotton. I have had some opportunity of observing an irrigation enterprise carried out during the past fifteen years by American capital. Here by utilizing the waters of a river, nearly a hundred thousand acres of arid land, which pre-
