into towns for self-protection—and covered with ripe corn and green wheat-fields.
One of these haciendas which we passed was beautiful, indeed. The rancho contains some fifty thousand acres. It is in the highest state of cultivation, and is valued by its owner, Justo L. Carresse, at $300,000 in gold. His wheat crop from this rancho, and a smaller one which we passed, is worth annually, fifty thousand dollars, and he also produces twenty thousand sacks of Indian corn of fine quality.
The laborers get only twenty-five or thirty- seven and a half cents per day, own no land, have no vested interest anywhere, and are half-clad in ragged cotton goods, and eat calabossas and tortillas and frijoles the year round. Were they born to be merely hewers of wood and drawers of water to the end of time? Is that all which is in store for them? What Spanish despotism, peon slavery, and religious superstition begun, poverty and civil war have perpetuated; and they are still but little advanced beyond the old state of slavery. They stand, hat in hand, in the blazing sun, so long as you are addressing them, and appear, on all occasions, to be thoroughly respectful, orderly, patient, and good dispositioned, though their poverty is something painful to behold. There is money enough sunk in the twelve great churches of Celaya—three would hold all the population—to build railroads through all this great valley, and decent houses for every family, and clothe and educate every child in the State; and these poor, patient, people and their ancestors paid it all.
Some day, not far distant, will, I hope, see these people becoming small land-owners, and fully informed of the rights with which the Republic has invested them;
