The Spaniards improved the agriculture of the country by introducing European grain, and fruit-trees, and by bringing the old Roman plough, which is used to this day in Mexico as in Spain, where two thousand years have not superseded its use or even altered it. Against these improvements we must set a heavy account of injury done to the country as regards its cultivation. The Conquest cost the lives of several hundred thousand of the labouring class; and numbers more were taken away from the cultivation of the land to work as slaves for the conquerors in building houses and churches, and in the silver-mines. When the inhabitants were taken away, the ground went out of cultivation, and much of it has relapsed into desert. Even before the Conquest, Mexico had been suffering for many years from incessant wars, in which not only thousands perished on the field of battle, but the prisoners sacrificed annually were to be counted by thousands more, while famine carried off the women and children whose husbands and fathers had perished. But the slaughter and famine of the first years of the Spanish Conquest far exceeded anything that the country had suffered before. At the time of the Conquest of Mexico the Spaniards let the native irrigating-works fall into decay; and they took still more active measures to deprive the land of its necessary water, by their indiscriminate destruction of the forests on the hills that surround the plains. When the trees were cut down, the undergrowth soon perished, and the soil which had served to check the descending waters in their course was soon swept away. During the four rainy months, each heavy shower sends down a flood along the torrent-bed which flows into a river, and so into the ocean, or, as in the Mexican valley, into a salt lake, where it only serves to injure the surrounding land. In both cases it runs away in utter waste. In later years the Spanish owners of the soil had the necessity of the system impressed upon them by force of circumstances; and large sums were spent upon the construction of irrigating channels, even in the outlying states of the North. In the American territory recently acquired from Mexico history has repeated itself in a most curious way. We learn from Froebel, the German traveller, that the new American settlers did not take kindly to the system of irrigation which they found at work in the country. They were not used to it, and it interfered with their ideas of liberty by placing restrictions upon their doing what they pleased on their own land. So they actually allowed many of the water-canals to fall into ruins. Of course they soon began to find out their mistake, and are probably investing heavily in water-supply by this time. We ought not to be too severe upon the Spaniards of the sixteenth century for an economical mistake which we find the Americans falling into under similar circumstances in the nineteenth. CHAPTER VII. CUERNAVACA. TEMISCO. XOCHICALCO.