The industries are limited almost exclusively to the extraction of the riches of the soil by mining and through deep oil wells. In all Mexico, with its vast sweep of territory, virtually nothing is produced for export excepting those riches which come from Mother Earth, and those overwhelmingly under the enterprising management of the foreign companies and individuals who alone have ever sought to develop them. Only one industry in Mexico puts human hands and human brains to the wheel of progress and creates wealth--that is the industry of growing sisal hemp in Yucatan. Sisal hemp is indispensable for the making of binder twine for the world’s wheat crop, and is the basis of what was once a great national and international industry. Yet to-day even that commodity has been cut in production almost to the point of destruction, by the machinations of Mexican government and graft, and Yucatan is not to-day the great purchasing center that it once was. Moreover, Yucatan is far from the Mexican mainland, a principality, a country of its own, and its riches have never been a true part of the resources of Mexico, for it buys and sells direct with the outside world. Gold is the common medium of circulation in Mexico to-day. There is not a peso of Mexican paper currency in use. All is gold, or foreign bills, with low-grade silver and copper as subsidiary coins. The use of gold is reassuring to the business man. It looks like prosperity and it does assure a firm rate of exchange. But the gold in Mexico does not mean these things. Its great significance is the absence of credit. Gold circulates because no man trusts the government, and every piece of gold that passes through your hands in Mexico tells you that Mexico is far from being on a stable financial basis, either as a government or as a business community. Gold is of value, really, only because it makes credit possible. When you must ship boxes of gold into distant states at an appalling rate of insurance against bandits and highwaymen, it is not prosperity, but rather the lack of it. When gold is in circulation, and there are no bills, the available money of the country is limited, literally, to the total of the gold and to not one cent more. When there is paper in circulation it means that the gold supply has been increased many fold because the credit of the government has been added to the gold to supplement the supply of money to be used in trade. In Mexico there is not only no paper money, but there is practically no commercial paper. The drafts of great foreign companies travel about the land for weeks and months before they are cashed and when they finally reach the bank on which they are drawn, the backs are covered with endorsements, and on some an extra sheet of paper has been pasted to carry more signatures. And that is not good business, and should not be reassuring to the prospective trader.