We shall not hope here successfully to dispel this mystery, even though we may have been there, traversed its varied surface, and lived among its people. To say that Mexico is the Egypt of the New World, whilst it is not untrue, is to deepen the atmosphere. The sandalled Indian creeps across his desert sands and irrigates them with his native torrents as he did in centuries past, lives in his wattle or adobe hut, and, if he no longer worships the sun, at least he stands before its morning rays to embrace its warmth--_el capa de los pobres_ ("the poor man's cloak")--for poverty denies him other comfort. The rich man is clothed in fine textures of European model and may dwell in a palace, but beneath his modernized exterior are traits of the Orient, and the blood of the Moor, the Goth, the Vandal, the Roman, the Celt, the Semite, brought hither in the Spaniard, is mingled with that of the Aztec, who lived upon the great plateau and built his temples of strange and bloody worship. No other American nation constitutes so wide a blending of original races. Spain itself was a veritable crucible of languages, peoples and creeds, whilst aboriginal Mexico contained a large number of tribes, each with their particular culture, or lack of such.[7] For Mexico, it is to be recollected, was not a land like the United States or Canada, which contained, relatively, but a few bands of Indians, without any particular form of government or developed institutions. [7] Some of these tribes were unutterably savage and brutal, but it is doubtful if their methods were worse than those of the Anglo-Saxon who invaded Britain, with the repulsive horrors they visited upon the early Britains, in wholesale massacre and torture of the Celts. The grandees of Spain came out to rule this diversified land, and they did not disdain to make it their home. Spain gave it of her best often, with capable legislators, laws; the _Ley de Indias_, enacted for the benefit of the colonies, and erudite professors and devout--over-devout--ecclesiastics; and these often carried out their work with patriotism and fervency. Although it is not yet, the student of history will be fain to think that out of this seed a good growth must in the future come to being, and this we may say without any unnecessary apologetics for Mexico. But what, we may ask, is the influence here, that throws back this fruitful land from time to time to anarchy, and makes its name a byword?