The greatest advance was under Diaz, when in thirty years Mexico rose from the ashes of her revolutions and flew toward the heights of commercial advancement. In that time her railways were almost all of them built, all the water power which she now has developed, the one great and productive irrigation section--the Laguna cotton district--reclaimed from the desert, the sisal hemp industry created, the factories, such as they are, built and set in operation. Virtually all of these advances were made with foreign capital and under the control of foreign engineers and managers. Success rewarded the faith and the efforts of all who devoted themselves to these developments and it was their conquering of the great natural handicaps of Mexico which made possible the glowing tales of her “treasure-house.” When such times as those come again, and only when they come, will the battle against Nature be resumed, and in its resumption, the signs of man’s great conquest reappear. FOOTNOTES: [2] This chapter is based upon the author’s article on Mexican Geography contributed to the important _Mexican Year Book for 1920-21_, published in Los Angeles, Calif., concurrently with this volume. [3] _The People of Mexico_, Book I, Chap. V. CHAPTER III THE PEOPLE WHO BUY A bamboo hut with a clumsy thatch of grass, a hovel of sundried bricks, made, as the Israelites made them, of straw and clay, a shack of unfinished lumber or rotting railway ties topped with a roof of laminated sheet-iron--these are the symbols of the social level of Mexico. Within them all a dirt floor, a box filled with earth for a brazier, two or three earthenware pots, a _metate_ over which the woman bends at her endless task of grinding meal for the family cakes of unleavened corn, a few rush mats for beds and a tawdry shrine with a dim light before it--the inert millions of Mexico live to-day as they have lived for a thousand years. Their minds untutored, their thoughts and desires confined literally to the animal plane, their religious instincts almost entirely superstition, their government the support of rulers upon the vast misery of the lowly, Mexico finds her parallels only in China and in Turkey. And Mexico is at our own back door, the cynosure of our most hopeful tradesmen!