"First, let me say that it has been asserted of Mexico that 'though geographically near, and having had commercial relations with the world for over three hundred years, there is probably less known of this country to-day than of almost any other claiming to be civilized.' 'To the Mexicans themselves,' declares an observing traveller, 'Mexico is not fully known; and there are hundreds of square miles in South Mexico that have never been explored; and whole tribes of Indians that have never been brought in contact with the white man.' "Mexico may well be called the country of revolutions, having passed through thirty-six within the limit of forty years. In that comparatively short period of time no less than seventy-three rulers, 'drest in a little brief authority,' have played their parts upon the Mexican stage until the curtain dropped (too often in blood) upon their acts, and they were seen no more. "Humboldt, in the seventeenth century, pronounced the fairy-like environs of the city of Mexico 'the most beautiful panorama the eye ever rested upon.' On the table-land of this country the traveller is, at some points, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. At such heights the air is so rarefied that the least physical effort well-nigh deprives the traveller of breath. 'Through this rarefied atmosphere all the climates and productions of the world,' it has been affirmed, 'are embraced within the scope of a single bird's-eye view.' In portions of the country the _vomito_ renders the climate especially unkindly to the alien. "We are told that three quarters of the present Mexican population can neither read nor write, possess little or no property, and can form no intelligent ideas of political liberty, or of constitutional government. "The degraded condition of the laboring classes is imputed in a measure to the constitutional inertia of a race who have no climatic conditions to contend with in their life-struggle; whose simple wants are easily satisfied, and who (it may be inferred) never know that 'divine discontent' which is the fulcrum on which the higher civilization turns. The manner of living, among this class, is thus described by Wells: