founded by Pedro Jose Romero de Terreros, the owner of the fabulously rich mines at Real del Monte. Here money may be borrowed on chattels at very low rates of interest, and everything is pledged, from a pair of cock's spurs to an automobile and from a silver ring to an iron safe. The smallest loan made is 12 cents and the largest $4,000.

The clerk who makes the loan must repay it out of his own pocket if the pawn is not redeemed or cannot be sold for a sum equivalent to the loan. Unredeemed pledges are marked with prices at which they will be sold, and every five months this price is marked down lower, until it finds a buyer, or until the point is reached where the clerk must pay the loan and take the pawn himself.

About 40,000 articles are pawned each month. The interest on loans amounts to about $20,000 a month. All profits go to the extension of the business.

From the American standpoint burial customs in Mexico are very strange. A grave may be rented in perpetuity or for a term of years. If the latter option is taken and the rent is not paid promptly at each recurring period, the bones of the occupant are ejected and thrown upon a great bone pile. These bones from time to time are cremated.

At Mexico City's great city of the dead, where 160,000 people have been buried, there is a cave which contains hundreds of tons of human ashes. The Mexican law forbids services at the grave since the separation of church and state under Benito Juarez.

Nothing is more heartrending than to witness a funeral of a child among the poor, and infant mortality is terribly high among them. Too poor to buy a coffin, they must content themselves with renting one. They place their own child in it, the husband takes it upon his shoulder, and together the family march to the grave, where the child is removed from the coffin and put into the ground, with nothing to protect it from the cold earth. but its little cotton shroud. Those who are better off use a street-car hearse and buy coffins for their dead.

THE MEXICAN PEOPLE

491

The most conspicuous thing about the male population of Mexico, so far as the masses of half-breeds are concerned, are their hats. These are bought even if their purchase does force the buyer to go hungry for months afterwards, for the peon is not nearly as much a slave to his haciendado as he is to his hat.

At one time the brims of the Mexican sombrero got so wide that the hats had to be tipped sidewise to be gotten into the cars, so the government resorted to a tax of $1 for each 4 inches of brim. above a certain width.

Grandiloquent promises and exaggerated courtesy is the characteristic of the people. To be "muy simpatico," heartily congenial, is the first law of their social code. Everybody puts his house at your disposal; it is yours. But nobody means. even to entertain you as his guest unless he says so in as many words. If you admire a piano, a watch, a house, or a hacienda, it is yours instantly, although you never get it.

The Mexican loves companionship. When he meets an old friend he hugs him to his heart, figuratively and literally, and with many pats upon his back_calls him the friend of his youth. He bows whenever he enters a public place, ostensibly to the person nearest the door, but in reality to the whole crowd.

Beggars flourish everywhere, and of all the woe-begone, bedraggled, miserablelooking creatures on the face of the earth, commend me to the Mexican beggar. "Un centavo, señor," rings in your ear day and night. Begging and looking wretched with them is an art whose mastery they begin to strive for while still babes in arms. They invoke the blessings of the saints and the love of God upon you when asking for alms and when receiving them, and the only way that yet has been discovered to get rid of them is to say "Pardoneme por Dios"—"Pardon me in the name of God." That is even a better way and a much more satisfactory one than calling the police.

Önce I was passing through a little town above San Luis Potosi, when I saw a bunch of little half-breeds ranging from

ten years down to a baby about a year old. I gave the baby a "cinco centavo" piece, and right before my eyes a little scoundrel about eight grabbed it away from the baby and ran. I tried the same experiment in several other places, with about the same result. Mexico is the only place I have ever visited where they steal from the babies.

Mexico is a land of holidays. Counting Sundays, there are 131 on the Mexican calendar, and it is asserted that more than half of the people observe them all. There are 52 saints' days, 15 solemn feast days, 3 holy days, and 6 family feast days. On certain of these days all Mexico takes to the festival, and it usually requires from one to three days for the peons to sober up and get back to regular work again.

A SPLENDID ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

The monuments left by the Aztecs and their predecessors in Mexico tell of a surprising ancient civilization. Where

once the Americans and the Mexicans engaged in deadly combat at Churubusco, and where until recently they fraternized at the beautiful Country Club long years before the astronomical observatory at Uranienborg was built, there arose an Aztec astronomical observatory. The Aztecs fixed their year with a determination of the actual time between the equinoxes more accurate than that of the Alexandrian scholars who made the Julian calendar. The latter calendar today is some 13 or 14 days out of accord with the seasons, while the Aztec calendar is only a few hours out of agreement with the equinoxes. They wrote their calendar on a great circular stone 22 feet in diameter, 3 feet thick, and weighing some 24 tons. The inscriptions on it have been worked out and the Aztec system of time. reckoning ascertained.

The Sacrificial Stone, containing a carved portrayal of the rights of sacrifice of the Aztecs, is also to be found in the National Museum, and a copy of it is in

493

our own National Museum. Tens of thousands of victims were offered up on this stone to the sun-god of the Aztecs, the principal part of the sacrificial rite being the plucking out of the yet-beating heart of the victim and holding it up to heaven.

The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, near Mexico City, while not as large as those of Egypt, bear wonderful inscriptions. The Chinese Minister to Mexico declares that one of these inscriptions occurs on the majority of tombs in China.

From the ruins of Palenque, known to have existed before the coming of Columbus, there was taken some years ago a tablet which shows, in bas-relief, two Indians standing in reverential attitude before a cross.

The earliest people who seem to have left any trace of their occupancy of the land in Mexico were the Toltecs. They were followed by the Chicemecs, called the barbarians of the North, and believed by some to have been the progeny of a race of people who came to the American continent either by way of the frozen Bering Straits or were borne across the seas by the Japan current.

Whether viewed from the standpoint of its past, contemplated from the standpoint of its present, or considered from the standpoint of its future, Mexico is now the great question - mark of the Western World. It will be a long, long climb until its population, four-fifths Indians and half-breeds, will reach that point in their national destiny where they can possess a government like our own. It will be years before the tragic days of the present can be wiped out and before the uncounted riches of its wonderful mineral and agricultural resources be fully capitalized.

can

But somehow, some day, Mexico will find that peace that is based on a united desire for peace and a united purpose to have it, and then Mexico will go forward as our own country has gone forward in the last fifty years.