A noticeable feature of Mexican business life in the capital is what may be termed the Anglo-Saxon--or rather Anglo-American--invasion, for of Britons there are but few in comparison with the ubiquitous American from the United States; and smart, capable-looking men from New York, or more generally from Chicago, or Kansas City, or St. Louis, or other great commercial centres of the middle west, have set up numerous offices and enterprises. They have brought a good deal of wealth into the country, in the form of capital invested in mines and railways, and Mexico has welcomed her _primos_, or cousins from the North, both for their gold and for their spirit of enterprise. The class of American business-man who goes to Mexico has much improved of late years; and these _hijos del Tio Samuel_, "sons of Uncle Sam," as the Mexicans sometimes jocularly dub them, are more representative of their country than the doubtful element of a few years since. The junction of these two tides of humanity which roll together but never mingle--the Americans and the Mexicans--affords much matter for interesting observation. The American influence on Mexican civilisation is partly good, partly bad, but it cannot yet be considered more than a drop in the ocean of change in the deep-seated Spanish individuality of the Mexican people. To sum up a mental impression of Mexico City, there rise before us the old and the new on the threshold of change; the antique, the quaint, and the refined, pressed close by the modern, the commercial, and the cheap: the hand of a haughty Castilian hidalgo-spirit held forth to the "cute" and business Yankee. But there is a great breach yet between the Chicago "drummer," or the American land-shark; and the Mexican gentleman. Here is a rich and developing soil, with--perhaps--some benefit for the masses: a new civilisation in the making; a new people being fashioned from an old; a plutocratic bulk trailing off into a mass of white and red-clothed poor _peones_ and swarthy Indians. Beautiful women, _serenatas_, bull-fights, courtesy, azure sky--all have inscribed upon the traveller's mind a pleasing and semi-romantic impression, a _conjunto_, whose interest and attraction, with perchance a regretful note, time does not easily dispel. CHAPTER XI MEXICAN LIFE AND TRAVEL