The complicated machinery by which our shoes are made, or the equally complicated machinery by which tin is worked up into culinary vessels, never entered into the dreams of a Mexican mechanic. No Mexican man of science ever thought of degrading himself so low as to undertake the improvement of the mechanic arts; yet it is astonishing to see what Mexican mechanics do accomplish with their imperfect means. I have often stopped to witness the success of a poor old man building a piano, which was both skillfully arranged and well-toned, and yet the tools employed were apparently inadequate for such a purpose. In the same primitive style were coaches built before foreigners came and substituted coaches of modern pattern instead of the old, egg-formed coach-bodies of the vice-kingdom. It may seem like trifling to be dwelling thus upon the character of the substratum of Mexican society, but it is from this very substratum that the wealth or poverty of a nation is to be traced. The sense of the dignity of labor is the foundation of American prosperity, while the degradation of the mechanics and laboring class of Mexicans is the cause of the national imbecility. THE STORY OF THE PORTRESS. Let us look at the common people of Mexico from another point of view. I will reproduce in substance the tale of the old Meztizo woman, who opens and shuts the great street door to all well-known inmates, by day and by night, and to such others as can give satisfactory answers. She is esteemed a lucky woman because she has the use of a small room on the ground floor for her services, where she and a number of her relatives are often hived together. Her story is very likely not true in every particular, for it can not be denied that she, like all of her class, does not consider falsehood _per se_ as any other than a venial sin. How should she, considering the teaching she receives?[56] But the story is nevertheless, in the main, a pretty fair picture of the life of the humbler classes in republican Mexico. She will tell you how her husband basely left her with a family of children, and took to another woman, because they were not able to pay the priest to get legally married. Her eldest son was seized and taken to the wars, where he was compelled to stand up to shoot and be shot at, to settle the question which of two sets of white men should enjoy the right of plundering the people. Whether he should hereafter be discharged honorably, or run away, or be killed in battle, it was the same to her, for the man that recruited the soldiers would know that he had once been a soldier, and would be sure to seize him first when ordered to furnish recruits; and, let what will be the course of political events, he is certainly lost to her forever.