ng. No traveller ever enters the
country without making this remark. The mass of the people are hardly
even with the world; and there are some few capitalists whose incomes
can scarcely be matched in England or Russia. Yet this state of things
has not produced a permanent aristocracy.

The general history of great fortunes repeats itself with monotonous
regularity. Fortunate miners or clever speculators, who have happened
to possess the gift of accumulating in addition to that of getting,
often make colossal fortunes. Miners have made the greatest sums, and
made them most rapidly. Fortunes of two or three millions sterling are
not uncommon now, and we often meet with them in the history of the
last century. They never seem to have lasted many years. Before the
Independence, the capitalist used to buy a patent of nobility, and
leave great sums to his children to maintain the new dignity; but they
hardly ever seem to have done anything but squander away their
inheritance, and we find the family returning to its original poverty
by the third or fourth generation.

Mexico is an easy place to make money in, in spite of the continual
disorders that prevail. In the mining-districts most men make money at
some time or other. The difficulty lies in keeping it. There seems to
be no training better suited for making a capitalist than the life of
the retail shopkeeper, especially in the neighbourhood of a mine. A
good share of all the money that is won and of all that is lost stops
in his till. Whoever makes a lucky hit in a mining-speculation, he has
a share of the profits, and when there is a "good thing" going, he is
on the spot to profit by it.

When once a man becomes a capitalist, there are many very profitable
ways of employing his money. Mines and cotton-factories pay well, so do
cattle-haciendas in the north, when honest administradors can be got to
manage them; and discounting merchants' bills is a lucrative business.
But far better than these ordinary investments are the monopolies, such
as the farming of the tobacco-duty, the mints, and those mysterious
transactions with the government in which ready cash is exchanged for
orders to pass goods at the Custom-house, and the other financial
transactions familiar to those who know the shifts and mystifications
of that astonishing institution, the Finance-department of Mexico.

We rode from Puebla to Orizaba. Amozoque, the first town on the road,
is a famous place for spu