The easiest way to make money on rubber trees is to write up a good elastic article on the possibilities of the industry, form a ten or twenty million dollar corporation and sell the stock to the uninitiated,--if there are any such left. It would be a debatable question with me, however, which would be the more attractive from an investment point of view,--stock in a rubber company in Mexico, or one in Mars. Both would have their advantages; the one in Mexico would possess the advantage of closer proximity, while the one in Mars would have the advantage of being so far away that one could never go there to be disillusioned. The chances for legitimate returns would be about the same in both places. It seems a pity that any of those persons who ever bought stock in bogus Mexican development companies should have suffered the additional humiliation of afterwards going down there to see what they had bought into. It is surprising that up to the present time no one has appeared before the credulous investing public with a fifty-million dollar chicle corporation, for here is a valuable commodity that grows wild in the woods almost everywhere, and a highly imaginative writer could devote a whole volume to the unbounded possibilities of making vast fortunes in this industry. While I was in Mexico a friend sent me some advertising matter of one of these development companies that was paying large dividends on its enormous capital stock from the profits on pineapples and coffee, when in point of fact there was not a coffee-tree on its place, and it was producing scarcely enough pineapples to supply the caretaker's family. In regard to coffee, we found that some American emigration company appeared to be making a legitimate effort to test the productivity of that staple, and had sent a number of thrifty American families into Mexico and settled them at the _mesa_,[8] several miles inland from Tuxpam. They had cleared up a great deal of land and put out several thousand coffee-plants. There are many reasons why this crop cannot be extensively and profitably raised in this part of Mexico,--and for that matter, I presume, in any other part. Foremost among the many obstacles is the labor problem. The native help is not only insufficient, but is utterly unreliable. It is at picking-time that the greatest amount of help is required, and even if it were possible to rely upon the laborers, and there were enough of them, there would not be sufficient work to keep them between the harvest-seasons. It would be totally impracticable to import laborers; the expense and the climate would both be prohibitive. Again, the price of labor here has increased greatly of late years, without a corresponding appreciation in the price of coffee.[9]